In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

23 What Emotions Tell Us about Time Sylvie Droit-Volet What really proves that we measure time in terms of the number of our sensations ... is the way we estimate the approximate length of a dream. There we have no artificial measure of time, no tick-tack of a clock to tell us the hour ... in this estimate in which the only element is our consciousness ... which leads to the strangest mistakes. A dream may seem to have lasted several hours when in reality it lasted only a few seconds. —Jean-Marie Guyau, La génèse de l’idée de temps When we compare the episodes of our everyday lives experienced in different emotional states, we have the strange impression that time is either sped up or slowed down. While time seems like an eternity when waiting for someone we love, it suddenly seems to fly when the loved one arrives. Time no longer exists! Initially, the study of our feeling of time was the preserve of writers and philosophers. Based in part on anecdotal reports, some philosophers have considered that time does not exist independently of our internal representations . Kant (1787) claimed that time is an a priori representation that we impose on our external world. For the young philosopher Guyau (1890), it is grounded in our experience . As he writes, “we evaluate durations a posteriori based on the number and the variety of our sensations” (53). Bergson (1968) takes up this idea by arguing that real duration is a pure and simple fact of experience. When psychologists started to address the question of time, they were profoundly influenced by these philosophers’ ideas, especially in Europe. Fraisse (1967) considered that time has no existence in itself and that its evaluation depends on the quantity and the quality of the changes that determine it. Piaget (1946), famous for his works on developmental psychology and genetic epistemology, devoted a whole book to explaining how the perception of time is derived from the perception of movements in space. However, the twentieth century produced a growing number of empirical demonstrations of the ability of animals and humans to estimate durations accurately. Several decades have therefore been spent elaborating and testing models of a putative mechanism—an internal clock—that is thought to be responsible for this accurate measurement of time. Meanwhile, the last ten years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in time distortions and the effect of emotions as a major cause of these distortions. 478 Sylvie Droit-Volet We are therefore witnessing an explosion in the number of new studies that are taking a fresh look at time estimation and showing how time is highly dependent on both external and internal contexts (for a recent review see Droit-Volet et al., 2013). However, one major risk lies in the temptation to rewrite the history of psychology of time, although new neuroscientific brain-imaging techniques will probably enable researchers to avoid this trap. The problem therefore lies in gaining a further understanding of how time is judged and how it is instantiated in our biology by expanding our knowledge beyond what we already know in order to challenge the dominant models of the internal clock. Within this perspective , what do the emotions tell us about time? 23.1 The Mechanisms Involved in the Perception of Time The start of modern science dates from the time when general questions were replaced by limited questions ; when instead of asking “How was the universe created?” “What is matter made of?” ... we started to ask “How does a stone fall?” “How does water flow in a pipe?” ... This change had a surprising result. Whereas the general questions had only produced limited answers, the limited questions were to lead to increasingly general answers. —François Jacob, Le jeu des possibles: Essai sur la diversité du vivant Psychological time is complex. Time seems to exist as a reality independent of us, as a physical feature of an objective world that we are able to measure. However, numerous studies have also shown how easily our time estimates can be distorted by our emotions. Under the influence of emotion, time seems shorter or longer than it really is. It therefore seems that time is also a pure product of our emotions and of the upheavals they produce in our bodies and minds. This is the paradox identified by Droit-Volet and Gil (2009): why are our time estimates so variable if we possess a sophisticated mechanism for...

Share