Induced Anxiety Makes Time Pass Quicker

People often say that during unpleasant events, e.g. traumatic incidents such as car accidents, time slows down (i.e. time is overestimated). However aversive events can elicit at least two dissociable subtypes of reactions: fear (transient and relating to an imminent event) and anxiety (diffuse and relating to an unpredictable event). We hypothesised that anxiety might have an opposite effect on time perception compared to fear. To test this we combined a robust anxiety manipulation (threat-of-shock) with a widely used timing task in which participants judged whether the duration of a stimulus was long or short. In line with our hypothesis, across three experiments (with varying stimulus timings and shock levels), participants significantly underestimated time under inducted anxiety, as indicated by a rightward shift of the psychophysical function (meta-analytic effect size: d=0.68, 95% confidence interval: 0.42-0.94). Our results suggest that experimentally inducing anxiety leads to underestimating the duration of temporal intervals, which might help explain different subjective experiences of disorders related to fear (e.g. specific phobias) and anxiety (e.g. generalised anxiety disorder).