Perceived Control in the Lab and in Daily Life Impact Emotion-Induced Temporal Distortions

What is it about?

When facing emotional events, people’s experience of time is altered. For instance, strong negative emotional events (e.g., a car accident with bloody victims) appear to pass by slowly or drag in time, while strong positive emotional events (e.g., a person having fun on a roller coaster) seem to fly by. The present study had two goals: 1) to replicate a previous finding in the literature showing that when people feel in control over emotional events, they experience all emotional events as lasting similar amounts of time. The present study used a large sample of participants. In one session, participants were made to feel in control over some emotional images they had to judge in terms of how long they lasted. In another session, the same participants were made to feel as if they were not in control over the emotional images they saw in the experiment. The results replicated the finding that perceived control over emotional events eliminates the typical emotion-induced time distortions. Furthermore, the results showed that people who have a higher sense of control in daily life (i.e., people desire more to be in control of events and situations, and who believe control resides in themselves) will have an enhanced experience of positive events and will benefit more when given control over emotional events in an experiment. Heightened levels of control will speed up the passage of time and perhaps make the task more enjoyable for them.

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