Time perception in depression: a meta-analysis

Abstract

Background: Depressive patients frequently report to perceive time as going by very slowly. Potential effects of depression on duration judgments have been investigated mostly by means of four different time perception tasks: verbal time estimation, time production, time reproduction, and duration discrimination. Ratings of the subjective flow of time have also been obtained.

Methods: By means of a classical random-effects meta-regression model and a robust variance estimation model, this meta-analysis aims at evaluating the inconsistent results from 16 previous studies on time perception in depression, representing data of 433 depressive patients and 485 healthy control subjects.

Results: Depressive patients perceive time as going by less quickly relative to control subjects (g=0.66, p=0.033). However, the analyses showed no significant effects of depression in the four time perception tasks. There was a trend towards inferior time discrimination performance in depression (g=0.38, p=0.079). The meta-regression also showed no significant effects of interval duration. Thus, the lack of effects of depression on timing does not depend on interval duration. However, for time production, there was a tendency towards overproduction of short and underproduction of long durations in depressive patients compared to healthy controls.

Limitations: Several aspects, such as influences of medication and the dopaminergic neurotransmitter system on time perception in depression, have not been investigated in sufficient detail yet and were therefore not addressed by this meta-analysis.

Conclusions: Depression has medium effects on the subjective flow of time whereas duration judgments basically remain unaffected.

Keywords: Depression; Interval timing tasks; Meta-analysis; Meta-regression; Time experience; Time perception.