The feeling of the passage of time linked to individual interoceptive awareness abilities

This experiment examined the judgment of the present passage of time at different response intervals during emotional stimuli presentation, and its relationship with participants’ interoceptive awareness and emotions. No difference was observed based on the time scale employed: slowing-down vs. speeding-up scale. Participants perceived time as passing more slowly with negative than positive emotional stimuli. Additionally, the feeling of time slowing increased with response intervals. This feeling of time slowing down was significantly related to participants’ feelings of boredom and their individual scores of interoceptive awareness. However, only interoceptive awareness scores were significant predictors of additional changes in the perception of time between the last and the initial response interval. Awareness of variation in the feeling of time is thus linked to the ability to detect subtle signals in the body. Our study provides data that validate the theory on the key role of interoceptive information associated with emotion states in time awareness.