Abstract
Objective: At present emotional experience and implicit emotion regulation (IER) abilities are mainly assessed though self-reports, which are subjected to several biases. The aim of the present studies was to validate the Clock’N test, a recently developed time estimation task employing emotional priming to assess implicitly emotional reactivity and IER.Methods: In Study 1, the Clock’N test was administered to 150 healthy participants with different age, laterality and gender, in order to ascertain whether these factors affected the test results. In phase 1 participant were asked to judge the duration of seven sounds. In phase 2, before judging the duration of the same sounds, participants were presented with short arousing video-clip used as emotional priming stimuli. Time warp was calculated as the difference in time estimation between phase 2 and phase 1, and used to assess how emotions affected subjective time estimations. In study 2, a representative sample was selected to provide normative scores to be employed to assess emotional reactivity (Score 1) and IER (Score 2), and to calculate statistical cutoffs, based on the 10th and 90th score distribution percentiles.Results: Converging with previous findings, the results of study 1 suggested that the Clock’N test can be employed to assess both emotional reactivity, as indexed by an initial time underestimation, and IER, as indexed by a progressive shift to time overestimation. No effects of gender, age and laterality were found.Conclusions: These results suggest that the Clock’N test is adapted to assess emotional reactivity and IER. After collection of data on the test discriminant and convergent validity, this test may be employed to assess deficits in these abilities in different clinical populations.
Highlights
Despite the disparate number of definitions (Kleinginna and Kleinginna, 1981), it is widely accepted that emotions are complex sets of reactions consisting of three components: (1) a behavioral/expressive component, indexed by emotional behaviors and emotional facial and bodily expressions; (2) a cognitive/experienced component, indexed by selfreported emotional feelings; and (3) a physiological/autonomic component, indexed by changes in the heart rate, electrodermal response, body temperature and respiratory rate (Dimberg, 1987)
This result is consistent with the studies showing that stimuli capturing attentional resources result in a time underestimation (e.g., Angrilli et al, 1997; Droit-Volet et al, 2007; Noulhiane et al, 2007; Tipples, 2010; Liu et al, 2015)
Around the 4th presented stimulus, participants showed a passage to time overestimation, which reflected the effect of implicit emotion regulation (IER) abilities, allowing to progressively disengaging the attention from the emotional aspects of the stimuli, and resulting in the classical arousal-elicited time overestimation
Summary
At present emotional experience and implicit emotion regulation (IER) abilities are mainly assessed though self-reports, which are subjected to several biases. The aim of the present studies was to validate the Clock’N test, a recently developed time estimation task employing emotional priming to assess implicitly emotional reactivity and IER. Methods: In Study 1, the Clock’N test was administered to 150 healthy participants with different age, laterality and gender, in order to ascertain whether these factors affected the test results. In phase 2, before judging the duration of the same sounds, participants were presented with short arousing video-clip used as emotional priming stimuli. Results: Converging with previous findings, the results of study 1 suggested that the Clock’N test can be employed to assess both emotional reactivity, as indexed by an initial time underestimation, and IER, as indexed by a progressive shift to time overestimation.
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