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. 2021 Dec 24:12:784752.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.784752. eCollection 2021.

Phrase Depicting Immoral Behavior Dilates Its Subjective Time Judgment

Lina Jia  1 , Bingjie Shao  1 , Xiaocheng Wang  1 , Zhuanghua Shi  2
Affiliations

Phrase Depicting Immoral Behavior Dilates Its Subjective Time Judgment

Lina Jia et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Intuitive moral emotions play a major role in forming our opinions and moral decisions. However, it is not yet known how we perceive the subjective time of moral-related information. In this study, we compared subjective durations of phrases depicting immoral, disgust, or neutral behaviors in a duration bisection task and found that phrases depicting immoral behavior were perceived as lasting longer than the neutral and disgusting phrases. By contrast, the subjective duration of the disgusting phrase, unlike the immoral phrase, was comparable to the neutral phrase. Moreover, the lengthening effect of the immoral phrase relative to the neutral phrase was significantly correlated to the anonymously prosocial tendency of the observer. Our findings suggest that immoral phrases induce embodied moral reaction, which alters emotional state and subsequently lengthens subjective time.

Keywords: disgust phrases; embodied timing; emotion; immoral phrases; time perception.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Schematic illustration of a trial procedure used in the experiment.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Temporal judgment results of Experiment 1. (A) Mean proportions of “long” responses (diamonds: the immoral phrase, stars: the neutral phrase) for a representative subject are plotted as a function of the probe durations, together with fitted psychometric curves (dashed: the immoral phrase, solid: the neutral phrase). (B) The mean PSEs and their respective one-standard errors for the two conditions. (C) The mean JNDs and their corresponding one-standard errors for the two conditions. *denotes p ≤ 0.05.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
The scatter diagram between the ΔPSE and the score of anonymous dimensions from PTM.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Temporal bisection results of Experiment 2. (A) The mean proportions of “long” responses from a representative subject are plotted (diamonds: the immoral phrase; crosses: the disgust phrase; and stars: the neutral phrase) against the probe durations, together with the fitted psychometric curves (dashed: the immoral phrase, dotted: the disgust phrase, and solid: the neutral phrase). (B) The mean PSEs and their respective one-standard errors are shown for the three conditions. (C) The mean JNDs and their respective one-standard errors are displayed for the three conditions. * denotes p ≤ 0.05.
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