Time experience during social distancing: A longitudinal study during the first months of COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil

Abstract

Social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic brought several modifications in our daily lives. With these changes, some people have reported alterations in their feelings of how fast time was passing. In this study, we assessed whether and how social distancing and the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced participants’ time awareness and production of time intervals. Participants ( n = 3855) filled in the first questionnaire approximately 60 days after the start of social distancing in Brazil and weekly questionnaires for 15 weeks during social distancing. Our results indicate that time was perceived as expanded at the beginning, but this feeling decreased across the weeks. Time awareness was strongly associated with psychological factors such as loneliness, stress, and positive emotions, but not with time production. This relation was shown between participants and within their longitudinal reports. Together, our findings show how emotions are a crucial aspect of how time is felt.

The Blursday database as a resource to study subjective temporalities during COVID-19

“…Notably, the more isolated the participants felt, the slower time seemed to pass. This observation generalizes how feeling isolated contributes to temporal distortions and the felt slowing of the passage of time, which has been noted in a Brazilian study 25 . It also accounts for the diversity of passage-of-time changes reported during lockdown and attributed to possible consequences of isolation such as boredom [19][20][21][22][23][24] .…”

“…Past and future temporal orientation and distances. The dilation and slowing down of the passage of time previously reported during social isolation 25 would predict that the more isolated participants were, the longer they should estimate temporal distances. As above, we tested this working hypothesis with both objective and subjective indices using a linear mixed effect model with the stringency index, the mobility index, the subjective confinement index, age and hour of day as covariates and the participant as a random factor.…”

“…In a Uruguayan study 24 , which assessed the experience of university students, the authors reported an association between psychological distress due to the COVID-19 restrictions and the feeling of a slower passage of time, a blurred sense of time (not knowing what time or day it is) and more boredom. In a longitudinal Brazilian study 25 , participants initially perceived an expansion of time, which steadily decreased over the following weeks. These surveys confirmed self-reported temporal distortions during lockdown but do not converge on their underlying explanatory causes.…”

“…Passage of time on the scale of a few days. Studies that have explored the effects of lockdown on time perception have converged on the notion that participants experienced temporal distortions, with a slowing down of the passage of time and an expansion of experienced time over days, both accounted for by factors such as boredom, sadness or depression during lockdowns 19,20,22,23,25 . Here we hypothesized that participants' experienced temporal distortions could be affected by how stringent the lockdowns were as well as individuals' ability to move freely (the stringency and mobility indices provided objective measures of confinement; Methods).…”

Experiencing a slow passage of time was an indicator of social and temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 pandemic

“…A single study compared time judgements expressed before the pandemic and those expressed during the pandemic 4 . A study investigated time expansion 3 by focusing on a host of phenomenological features previously validated to be indicative of the passage of time. By contrast, while studies looking at temporal distance judgements differed in the name they gave to the judgement, they actually all used a similar frame for it.…”