Abstract
Time perception plays a fundamental role in people’s daily life activities, and it is modulated by changes in environmental contexts. Recent studies have observed that attractive faces generally result in temporal dilation and have proposed increased arousal to account for such dilation. However, there is no direct empirical result to evidence such an account. The aim of the current study, therefore, was to clarify the relationship between arousal and the temporal dilation effect of facial attractiveness by introducing a rating of arousal to test the effect of arousal on temporal dilation (Experiment 1) and by regulating arousal via automatic expression suppression to explore the association between arousal and temporal dilation (Experiment 2). As a result, Experiment 1 found that increased arousal mediated the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces; Experiment 2 showed that the downregulation of arousal attenuated the temporal dilation of attractive faces. These results highlighted the role of increased arousal, which is a dominating mechanism of the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces.
Highlights
The ability to perceive time is crucial to people’s everyday life
Further comparison found that for high and medium strength faces, the temporal dilation effects in the attractive face session was greater than those in the unattractive face session. These results suggested that facial attractiveness could modulate time perception. Both increase and decrease of facial attractiveness led to the dilation of time perception, and attractive faces tended to result in salient temporal dilation
Further comparison found that the temporal dilation in the experimental group was generally smaller than that in the control groups, ps < 0.05. These results indicated that the manipulation of automatic expression suppression attenuates the temporal dilation of both attractive and unattractive faces, and the attenuation is greater for attractive faces, suggesting that arousal plays an important role in the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces
Summary
The ability to perceive time is crucial to people’s everyday life. It is fundamental to motor activities (e.g., walking, dancing, and driving) and essential for social communications (such as word segmentation, speaking speed, and even language understanding). Unlike the linear progression of physical time, human time perception is not always stable. It can be adaptively distorted by the changing environment rather than perceived veridically. Ogden (2013) asked participants to verbally estimate the duration of the attractive, average, and unattractive faces. Arantes et al (2013) adopted the temporal reproduction task and found that participants reproduced longer durations for attractive faces and neutral stimuli than unattractive faces. Using a similar temporal reproduction task, Tian et al (2019) found the time perception of attractive faces to be longer than that of unattractive faces, and such a temporal dilation effect was highlighted by opposite-sex faces. Using a similar temporal reproduction task, Tian et al (2019) found the time perception of attractive faces to be longer than that of unattractive faces, and such a temporal dilation effect was highlighted by opposite-sex faces. Tomas and Španic (2016) employed a temporal bisection task that required participants to distinguish whether the presentation time of faces (400–1,600 ms) was close to the short or long anchor
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