How Facial Attractiveness Affects Time Perception: Increased Arousal Results in Temporal Dilation of Attractive Faces

Time perception plays a fundamental role in people's daily life activities, and it is modulated by changes in environmental contexts. Recent studies have observed that attractive faces generally result in temporal dilation and have proposed increased arousal to account for such dilation. Howeve...

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Published inFrontiers in psychology Vol. 12; p. 784099
Main Authors Zhou, Sihong, Li, Lingjing, Wang, Fuyun, Tian, Yu
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 10.12.2021
Subjects
arousal
automatic suppression
facial attractiveness
mediation analysis
Psychology
time perception
facial attractiveness
mediation analysis
time perception
automatic suppression
arousal
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Summary:Time perception plays a fundamental role in people's daily life activities, and it is modulated by changes in environmental contexts. Recent studies have observed that attractive faces generally result in temporal dilation and have proposed increased arousal to account for such dilation. However, there is no direct empirical result to evidence such an account. The aim of the current study, therefore, was to clarify the relationship between arousal and the temporal dilation effect of facial attractiveness by introducing a rating of arousal to test the effect of arousal on temporal dilation (Experiment 1) and by regulating arousal automatic expression suppression to explore the association between arousal and temporal dilation (Experiment 2). As a result, Experiment 1 found that increased arousal mediated the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces; Experiment 2 showed that the downregulation of arousal attenuated the temporal dilation of attractive faces. These results highlighted the role of increased arousal, which is a dominating mechanism of the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces.
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Reviewed by: Shengdong Chen, Southwest University, China; Li Quan, Qujing Normal University, China
This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
Edited by: Huazhan Yin, Hunan Normal University, China
ISSN:1664-1078
1664-1078
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.784099