Abstract
Previous research has shown that judgments of the experienced velocity of recent years passing by vary depending on the number of autobiographical memories being activated in the moment of judging. While a body of evidence shows affect to have an impact on both prospective and retrospective judgments on the experience of time for short periods, the effect of valence of memories on the experience of the passage of long intervals has not been examined yet. Thus, we asked 282 people to retrieve five either emotionally positive or negative memories from the last 5years before judging the subjectively experienced passage of time of these years. However, positive and negative events differ in some ways beyond valence, e.g., the ascribed impact on the participants’ subsequent lives as well as the stability of ascribed affective intensity: The latter decreased over time for negative but not for positive memories while ascribed impact was markedly higher for positive memories. Results indicate no significant differences between the two conditions, even after controlling for the aforementioned differences. However, exploratory analyses show that participants rate time to have passed faster, the longer the activated memories dated back on average, a result that seems in line with contextual-change hypothesis.
Highlights
Autobiographical Memory and the Experience of TimeA famous quote of Benjamin Franklin suggests that one should not squander time since it “is the stuff life is made of ” (e.g., Leo-Lemay, 2006, p. 194)
The main goal of this work was to investigate whether the emotional valence of currently activated memories has an impact on subsequent passage of time judgments (POTJs) for intervals of several years
While the present study is the first investigating the impact of valence on retrospective POTJs for multiannual intervals, numerous studies have shown that emotional factors have a significant impact on prospective experience of time for short intervals (e.g., Droit-Volet et al, 2004; Noulhiane et al, 2007; Lambrechts et al, 2011; Kliegl et al, 2015), and some studies show an effect of emotional factors on the retrospective experience of time for periods up to some minutes (e.g., Hui et al, 1997; Wearden, 2005)
Summary
Autobiographical Memory and the Experience of TimeA famous quote of Benjamin Franklin suggests that one should not squander time since it “is the stuff life is made of ” (e.g., Leo-Lemay, 2006, p. 194). Ending the debate here would ignore the possibility that people might be able to evaluate their experience of time passage: It has been argued that passage of time is the perception of succession, of one event happening after another (Deng, 2019) This can be read as a reflection of Franklin’s idea: in hindsight, life is the accumulation of time, which is mentally represented as succession of events. This view suggests that the information we use to both access and define time in the past are the memories of events from this exact past. Following these thoughts, trying to sense a subjective velocity of passed intervals means examining the succession and accumulation of accessible memories and – in order to be able to come to a judgment – compares the result with one’s individual conception of a prototypical interval
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