Social contagion of time perception

Time, Emotion and the Embodiment of Timing

“…The slowing of the internal clock system could reflect a dysfunction in the dopaminergic activity of the frontostriatal loops subtending duration processing (see e.g. Harrington, Zimbelman, Hinton & Rao, 2010;Matell & Meck, 2000, 2004. Droit-Volet (2013b) recently showed that, in children, time resolution improves with information processing speed.…”

“…Nevertheless, the discrepancy between the findings on depressed patients' subjective experience of time and those on their performances on different time perception tasks suggests that these two forms of judgment involve different processes. Time perception involves mechanisms common to both human adults and other animals, as those described in the different models of the internal clock (see Gibbon, Church & Meck, 1984;Matell & Meck, 2000, 2004Treisman, 1963). By contrast, the sense of time's passage probably results from human-specific introspection (i.e.…”

“…It is now widely accepted that fear is highly dependent on the dopaminergic (DA) system (Phelps & Ledoux, 2005). Within the framework of the Striatal Beat Frequency (SBF) model (Mattel & Meck, 2000, 2004, Meck, Penney & Pouthas (2008) reported two types of DA release: a phasic and tonic DA release. The role of the phasic DA release would be to serve as a start gun by indicating the onset of a relevant signal for the synchronization of the cortical oscillations and the resetting of the membrane properties of the striatal spiny neurons.…”

“…In their social interactions, mothers and children try to match their time, with the mothers slowing down their rhythm, speaking or walking more slowly, and the children trying to speed up. Conway (2004) showed that people share a more similar sense of time's passage when they interact than when they do not. When an adult is too slow, compared with the other members of the group (slower speech, slower learning), this shared sense may be disrupted, thus becoming a source of social exclusion.…”

“…When an adult is too slow, compared with the other members of the group (slower speech, slower learning), this shared sense may be disrupted, thus becoming a source of social exclusion. Conway (2004) argued that it is because individuals tend to become synchronized as a result of mutual influence that they have similar experiences of the passage of time. In this line, in one of our studies, we showed that empathic people, who succeed better than the non-empathic people do to simulate and recognize the others' emotion, were also more prone to time distortions in a social context.…”