The effect of emotion intensity on time perception: a study with transcranial random noise stimulation

Emotional facial expressions provide cues for social interactions and emotional events can distort our sense of time. The present study investigates the effect of facial emotional stimuli of anger and sadness on time perception. Moreover, to investigate the causal role of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in emotional recognition, we employed transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) over OFC and tested the effect on participants’ emotional recognition as well as on time processing. Participants performed a timing task in which they were asked to categorize as “short” or “long” temporal intervals marked by images of people expressing anger, sad or neutral emotional facial expressions. In addition, they were asked to judge if the image presented was of a person expressing anger or sadness. The visual stimuli were facial emotional stimuli indicating anger or sadness with different degrees of intensity at high (80%), medium (60%) and low (40%) intensity, along with neutral emotional face stimuli. In the emotional recognition task, results showed that participants were faster and more accurate when emotional intensity was higher. Moreover, tRNS over OFC interfered with emotion recognition, which is in line with its proposed role in emotion recognition. In the timing task, participants overestimated the duration of angry facial expressions, although neither emotional intensity not OFC stimulation significantly modulated this effect. Conversely, as the emotional intensity increased, participants exhibited a greater tendency to overestimate the duration of sad faces in the sham condition. However, this tendency disappeared with tRNS. Taken together, our results are partially consistent with previous findings showing an overestimation effect of emotionally arousing stimuli, revealing the involvement of OFC in emotional distortions of time, which needs further investigation.