Individual time perception is affected by emotion, and there are two competing hypotheses to explain the effect. Disembodied emotion perspective proposes that "If the mind is happy, the time flies; if the heart is sad, the day feels like years", which shows the emotion effect of time perception. However, embodied emotion perspective indicates that emotional motor stimuli are perceived longer than static ones. The aim of this article was to explain the emotion effect of time perception based on the comparison of disembodied and embodied emotion perspectives.
This article reviewed the disembodied and embodied emotion perspectives, analyzed the evidences and theoretical explanations of emotion effect, and then proposed the future direction. It can provide more basis for the emotion effect mechanism of time perception, and more reference for the practice of emotional timing. The emotional effect of time perception refers to the phenomenon that time perception is relatively distorted due to the influence of emotion, and it can be discriminability explained based on disembodied and embodied emotion perspectives. Disembodied emotion perspective proposes that emotion generation is based on the processing of emotional stimulus itself, without physical participation; embodied emotion perspective indicates that emotion generation is based on the cooperation of processing of emotional stimulus and physical itself. On the basis of disembodied emotion perspective, emotion effect of time perception can be explained by a single physiological arousal mechanism, a single attention mechanism, the interaction mechanism of physiological arousal and attention (the action mode is regulated by arousal degree or dynamically regulated by target duration length),while the effect of embodied emotion perspectives can be explained by the physical adjustment of internal clock rate, the internal receptive intensity and the level of neural energy.
The future study should pay more attention on three directions. Firstly, on the basis of disembodied emotion perspective, it is necessary to distinguish the meaning of "arousal", "attention" in the specific research, and pay more attention on the main effects of variables such as "arousal" and "attention" and the moderating effects of other variables (body or environmental variables); Secondly, on the basis of embodied emotion perspective, it is necessary to clarify the intension of internal receptive intensity and neural energy in specific research, and explore the mechanism of emotion effect of time perception to further improve the hypothesis of regulation of time perception by embodied emotional stimulation; Thirdly, the preconditions of the explanation of the emotion effect of time perception include the determination of disembodied or embodied emotion perspectives.