A Relationship Between Time Perception and State-Anxiety

Participants in this study were randomly assigned to one of three interval groups of either one, three, or five minutes. All participants were asked to estimate a group-assigned time interval and complete the state portion of the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). It was hypothesized that higher levels of state anxiety would cause participants to overestimate the passage of time. It was also hypothesized that shorter interval durations would be estimated more accurately than longer interval durations. Results of a ttest did not support the first hypothesis. Results of a linear trend analysis did support the second hypothesis (P < .05). These results indicate that state-anxiety does not cause the passage of time to be overestimated and that interval duration length affects how accurately time is estimated. Implications of this study are important to the understanding of human time-management ability and time estimation errors.