The Perception of Time Is Underestimated in Adolescents With Anorexia Nervosa

Abstract

Research has revealed reduced temporal discounting (i.e., increased capacity to delay reward) and altered interoceptive awareness in anorexia nervosa (AN). In line with the research linking temporal underestimation with a reduced tendency to devalue a reward and reduced interoceptive awareness, we tested the hypothesis that time duration might be underestimated in AN. Our findings revealed that patients with AN displayed lower timing accuracy in the form of timing underestimation compared with controls. These results were not predicted by clinical, demographic factors, attention, and working memory performance of the participants. The evidence of a temporal underestimation bias in AN might be clinically relevant to explain their abnormal motivation in pursuing a long-term restrictive diet, in line with the evidence that increasing the subjective temporal proximity of remote future goals can boost motivation and the actual behavior to reach them.

Alexithymia Is Linked with a Negative Bias for Past and Current Events in Healthy Humans

“…Our ability to represent time is the result of an intricate interaction between several variables, which are provided by the surrounding environment (e.g., space and quantity information) [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] or related to our internal states, individual variables (e.g., executive functions, arousal, interoception, aging, handedness, body weight [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ] and emotions, as shown by a rich literature in the field [ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ] have shown that the duration of emotional sounds is perceived to last longer than judgement of neutral sounds. Similar time distortions were documented in the perception of facial stimuli.…”

Time Processing, Interoception, and Insula Activation: A Mini-Review on Clinical Disorders

“…In terms of time-keeping skills in eating disorders, two recent contributions document a temporal underestimation in AN ( Vicario and Felmingham, 2018b ) and a temporal overestimation in obesity ( Vicario et al, 2019 ) for the estimation of supra-second durations.…”

The case of muddled units in temporal discounting

“…However we also have empirical support for atypical time perception in addictive disorders (stimulant-dependent participants over-estimate time), with the explicit suggestion that this may influence broad lack of impulse control (Wittmann, Leland, Churan, & Paulus, 2007). On the other end of the spectrum, patients with anorexia nervosa display some of the lowest observed discounting behaviour (Steinglass et al, 2012;Decker, Figner, & Steinglass, 2015;Bartholdy et al, 2017) also under-estimate time (Vicario & Felmingham, 2018). So to what extent is this discounting behaviour caused by changes in discount rates versus subjective time perception?…”