Personality and the experience of time.

Abstract

Two studies were done to investigate the effects of personality, as dichotomized along a thought-action dimension, on time perception. The first study divided 27 psychiatric patients into groups depending on whether their weighted color responses on the Rorschach exceeded or were exceeded by the sum of the movement responses. Those subjects with an introversive Experience Balance (EB) overestimated time, whereas those subjects with an extratensive EB underestimated time. The mean difference between the two groups on the ratio of estimated time to elapsed time was significant beyond the .01 level (t = 4.39). A second study used 24 normal subjects divided into high introversive and high extraversive based on the Maudsley Personality inventory. Two .time judgments were obtained from each subject, and the effect of situational factors (stress) as well as personality was noted. The results were similar to those of Study 1. The high-extraversive subjects underestimated and the high-introversive subjects overestimated time. Also, the time estimation of the action-oriented subjects was significantly more influenced by situational factors than were the time judgments of the ideational subjects. Even though in Study 1 there was no relationship between clinical diagnosis and the tendency to overestimate or underestimate the passage of time, the relationship between thought-action and time estimation was significant in both normal and clinical samples.

When time flies: How abstract and concrete mental construal affect the perception of time.

“…Finally, relating our findings to previous research that demonstrates that time is perceived as passing more quickly when tasks are difficult (e.g., Buchwald & Blatt, 1974;Hanley & Morris, 1982), distracting (e.g., Block et al, 1980Block et al, , 2010Block & Zakay, 2008), or changing (e.g., Ahn et al, 2009;Avni-Babad & Ritov, 2003), the results of the present Studies 3 and 4 suggest that any effect of task demands on time perception may be moderated by the level on which the task demands are construed. It would be interesting to see, for instance, whether distraction or task difficulty would have less influence on time perception when it pertains to a higher level of construal or when one is construing situations abstractly.…”

“…Experiments that varied processing difficulty (Buchwald & Blatt, 1974;Hanley & Morris, 1982), distraction (Block, George, & Reed, 1980;Block et al, 2010;Block & Zakay, 2008), or changes in the situation in which time is judged (Ahn et al, 2009;Avni-Babad & Ritov, 2003) have consistently demonstrated that rich experiences are perceived as subjectively shorter. In a study by Ahn et al (2009, Experiment 2), for instance, participants watched a show of five slides that were presented five times each.…”

Genetic Determinants of Time Perception Mediated by the Serotonergic System

“…Our study may provide a new view on the psychobiological background of some individual differences. Many studies have reported an association between duration representation parameters and personality [49] – [51] , specifically impulsivity [49] , [52] and psychoticism [50] . Time perception was found to be altered in depressive states [53] – [56] : specifically, Gil and colleagues [56] reported more negative PSEs in a temporal bisection task for depressive patients, compared to healthy controls.…”

Test anxiety and the passage of time.

“…In analyzing subjective judgments of time duration, it seems logical to consider simultaneously two variables: the situation and the characteristics (hopes, fears, etc.) that a person brings to the situation (Buchwald & Blatt, 1974;Sarason, Smith, & Diener, 1975). The present article reports the results of three experiments devised from this perspective.…”