Abstract
The present study used the presentation of food pictures and judgements about their duration to assess the emotions elicited by food in women suffering from an eating disorder (ED). Twenty-three women diagnosed with an ED, namely anorexia (AN) or bulimia nervosa (BN), and 23 healthy controls (HC) completed a temporal bisection task and a duration discrimination task. Intervals were marked with emotionally pre-rated pictures of joyful and disgusting food, and pictures of neutral objects. The results showed that, in the bisection task, AN women overestimated the duration of food pictures in comparison to neutral ones. Also, compared to participants with BN, they perceived the duration of joyful food pictures as longer, and tended to overestimate the duration of the disgusting ones. These effects on perceived duration suggest that AN women experienced an intense reaction of fear when they were confronted to food pictures. More precisely, by having elevated the arousal level and activated the defensive system, food pictures seemed to have speeded up the rhythm of the AN participants’ internal clock, which led to an overestimation of images’ duration. In addition, the results revealed that, in both tasks, ED women presented a lower temporal sensitivity than HC, which was related to their ED symptomatology (i.e., BMI, restraint and concern) and, particularly, to their weaker cognitive abilities in terms of attention, processing speed and working memory. Considered all together, the findings of the present experiment highlight the role of fear and anxiety in the manifestations of AN and point out the importance of considering non-temporal factors in the interpretation of time perception performance.
Highlights
Time perception refers to the subjective experience of time, which indicates how a person interprets the duration of an event
The present study showed that women suffering from AN presented an intense reaction of fear when they were confronted to food pictures, regardless of the emotion associated with said pictures
In a temporal processing perspective, this emotional reaction was suggested by the overestimation of durations of food stimuli in comparison to object ones, due to a rise of arousal and the activation of the defensive system
Summary
Time perception refers to the subjective experience of time, which indicates how a person interprets the duration of an event. The sense of time is modulated by intrinsic (e.g., age, gender, menstrual cycle; Block et al, 2000; Morita et al, 2005; Glicksohn and Hadad, 2012; Pütz et al, 2012; Ferreira et al, 2016) and extrinsic contexts (e.g., medication, drugs, rhythmical stimuli; Droit-Volet et al, 2010; Lake and Meck, 2013; Shahabifar and Movahedinia, 2016). As suggested by the saying “time flies when we are having fun,” time perception is intimately connected to emotional life (Droit-Volet and Gil, 2009).
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