Effects of emotional valence and arousal on acoustic duration reproduction assessed via the “dual klepsydra model”

Jiří Wackermann,Dharol Tankersley,Karin Meissner,Marc Wittmann

doi:10.3389/fnbot.2014.00011

Abstract

We report results of an acoustic duration reproduction task with stimulus duration of 2, 4, and 6 s, using 45 emotionally negative, positive, and neutral sounds from the International Affective Digitized Sounds System, in a sample of 31 young healthy participants. To investigate the influence of induced emotions on perceived duration, the effects of emotional modulation were quantified in two ways: (1) via model-free indices (aggregated ratios of reproduced times), and (2) via dual klepsydra model (dkm)-based estimates of parameters of internal time representation. Both data-analytic approaches reveal an effect of emotional valence/arousal, namely, a significantly longer reproduction response for emotional stimuli than for the neutral stimuli. The advantage of the dkm-based approach is its ability to disentangle stimulus-related effects, which are represented by “flow intensities,” from general effects which are due to the lossy character of temporal integration. We explain the rationale of the dkm-based strategy and interpret the observed effect within the dkm-framework as transient increase of internal “flows.” This interpretation is in line with recent conceptualizations of an “embodiment” of time where the model-posited flows correspond to the ongoing stream of interoceptive (bodily) neural signals. Neurophysiological findings on correlations between the processing of body signals and the perception of time provide cumulative evidence for this working hypothesis.

Highlights

Perception of duration is known to be dependent on many factors, from physical characteristics of perceived events (Goldstone and Goldfarb, 1963; Block, 1978; Grondin, 1993) to psychophysiological states of the perceiving subject (Wittmann, 2009; Mella, Conty, and Pouthas, 2011; Droit-Volet et al, 2013a)
In the present study we investigated the perception of temporal intervals marked by acoustic stimuli of varied emotional character, using the duration reproduction paradigm
The aim of the present study was to explore the effects of emotional modulation on duration reproduction in the supra-second range (2–6 s), using acoustic stimuli from a standardized, valence and arousal level rated system (IADS; Bradley and Lang, 2007)

Summary

Introduction

Perception of duration is known to be dependent on many factors, from physical characteristics of perceived events (Goldstone and Goldfarb, 1963; Block, 1978; Grondin, 1993) to psychophysiological states of the perceiving subject (Wittmann, 2009; Mella, Conty, and Pouthas, 2011; Droit-Volet et al, 2013a). The theoretical framework of the study was the hypothesis of bodily states being the physiological basis for time perception (Wittmann, 2009; Wittmann et al, 2010a) This hypothesis is based on the embodiment approach by Craig (2009) who proposes that our perception of time relates to emotional and visceral processes that all share a common underlying neural system within the interoceptive system and the insular cortex. In this context, several studies have shown how emotions and bodily arousal lead to an overestimation of duration. We use a “klepsydraic” model, belonging to the class of “lossy integration” models, to quantify, test and interpret observed effects

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Conclusion