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BACKGROUND: Although motor symptoms predominate in essential tremor, increasing evidence indicates additional cognitive deficits. According to the pivotal role of cognitive functioning for temporal information processing and acknowledging the relevance of temporal information processing for movement coordination, we investigated whether essential tremor patients exhibit time reproduction deficits. METHODS: A total of 24 essential tremor patients and 24 healthy controls performed sub- and suprasecond visual duration reproduction tasks of 500 to 900 milliseconds and 1.6 to 2.4 seconds, respectively. To differentiate deficient time processing from motor or other cognitive dysfunctions, the average temporal reproduction errors were correlated with tremor severity, immediate and delayed word-list recall performance, and verbal fluency. RESULTS: Essential tremor patients significantly underreproduced sub- and suprasecond time intervals longer than 800 milliseconds. Moreover, time compression correlated significantly with semantic verbal fluency and word-list retrieval performance, but not with tremor severity. CONCLUSION: Data suggest impaired temporal processing in essential tremor, corroborating evidence for specific cognitive deficits. © 2016 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.

Hallucinogenic psilocybin is known to alter the subjective experience of time. However, there is no study that systematically investigated objective measures of time perception under psilocybin. Therefore, we studied dose-dependent effects of the serotonin (5-HT)2A/1A receptor agonist psilocybin (4-phosphoryloxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine) on temporal processing, employing tasks of temporal reproduction, sensorimotor synchronization and tapping tempo. To control for cognitive and subjective changes, we assessed spatial working memory and conscious experience. Twelve healthy human volunteers were tested under placebo, medium (115 microg/kg), and high (250 microg/kg) dose conditions, in a double-blind experimental design. Psilocybin was found to significantly impair subjects' ability to (1) reproduce interval durations longer than 2.5 sec, (2) to synchronize to inter-beat intervals longer than 2 sec and (3) caused subjects to be slower in their preferred tapping rate. These objective effects on timing performance were accompanied by working-memory deficits and subjective changes in conscious state, namely increased reports of 'depersonalization' and 'derealization' phenomena including disturbances in subjective 'time sense.' Our study is the first to systematically assess the impact of psilocybin on timing performance on standardized measures of temporal processing. Results indicate that the serotonin system is selectively involved in duration processing of intervals longer than 2 to 3 seconds and in the voluntary control of the speed of movement. We speculate that psilocybin's selective disruption of longer intervals is likely to be a product of interactions with cognitive dimensions of temporal processing -presumably via 5-HT2A receptor stimulation.

Experienced meditators typically report that they experience time slowing down in meditation practice as well as in everyday life. Conceptually this phenomenon may be understood through functional states of mindfulness, i.e., by attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and enhanced memory. However, hardly any systematic empirical work exists regarding the experience of time in meditators. In the current cross-sectional study, we investigated whether 42 experienced mindfulness meditation practitioners (with on average 10 years of experience) showed differences in the experience of time as compared to 42 controls without any meditation experience matched for age, sex, and education. The perception of time was assessed with a battery of psychophysical tasks assessing the accuracy of prospective time judgments in duration discrimination, duration reproduction, and time estimation in the milliseconds to minutes range as well with several psychometric instruments related to subjective time such as the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, the Barratt Impulsivity Scale and the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory. In addition, subjective time judgments on the current passage of time and retrospective time ranges were assessed. While subjective judgements of time were found to be significantly different between the two groups on several scales, no differences in duration estimates in the psychophysical tasks were detected. Regarding subjective time, mindfulness meditators experienced less time pressure, more time dilation, and a general slower passage of time. Moreover, they felt that the last week and the last month passed more slowly. Overall, although no intergroup differences in psychophysical tasks were detected, the reported findings demonstrate a close association between mindfulness meditation and the subjective feeling of the passage of time captured by psychometric instruments.

Analyses of neural mechanisms of duration processing are essential for the understanding of psychological phenomena which evolve in time. Different mechanisms are presumably responsible for the processing of shorter (below 500 ms) and longer (above 500 ms) events but have not yet been a subject of an investigation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In the present study, we show a greater involvement of several brain regions - including right-hemispheric midline structures and left-hemispheric lateral regions - in the processing of visual stimuli of shorter as compared to longer duration. We propose a greater involvement of lower-level cognitive mechanisms in the processing of shorter events as opposed to higher-level mechanisms of cognitive control involved in longer events.

Nausea often occurs in stressful situations, such as chemotherapy or surgery. Clinically relevant placebo effects in nausea have been demonstrated, but it remains unclear whether stress has an impact on these effects. The aim of this experimental study was to investigate the interplay between acute stress and placebo effects in nausea. 80 healthy female volunteers susceptible to motion sickness were randomly assigned to either the Maastricht Acute Stress Test or a non-stress control condition, and to either placebo treatment or no treatment. Nausea was induced by a virtual vection drum and behavioral, psychophysiological as well as humoral parameters were repeatedly assessed. Manipulation checks confirmed increased cortisol levels and negative emotions in the stressed groups. In the non-stressed groups, the placebo intervention improved nausea, symptoms of motion sickness, and gastric myoelectrical activity (normo-to-tachy (NTT) ratio). In the stressed groups, the beneficial effects of the placebo intervention on nausea and motion sickness remained unchanged, whereas no improvement of the gastric NTT ratio was observed. Results suggest that placebo effects on symptoms of nausea and motion sickness are resistant to experimentally-induced stress. Stress most likely interfered with the validity of the gastric NTT ratio to measure nausea and thus the gastric placebo effect.

IntroductionCurrent methods of assessing digital technology use fail to adequately capture a holistic picture of how individuals experience digital technology during daily life. This is because current measures focus on measuring the frequency/duration of specific forms of technology use or problematic use. This research aimed to create two general measures of digital technology use and experience, respectively, which are flexible amid technological changes.MethodsThe measured constructs were specified via bottom-up analysis of an international qualitative study (N=300) on post-covid digital practices. Across three studies we developed and validated the measures using data from 2227 participants.ResultsExploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses indicated that the Quality of Digital Experience Scale contains 26 items, measuring individuals’ perceptions and overall experience of digital technology usage and its impact on Well-being, Time and Efficiency, and Social Connectedness. The second scale, the Immersion in Digital Life Scale consists of five separate questions concerning individuals’ estimation of how much digital technology is present in different areas of life.DiscussionThe scales offer reliable measurements of individuals’ interactions with technology in the digital era. Their ability to capture engagement beyond frequency and duration will facilitate greater understanding of the complexities of the positive and negative impacts of digital practices on individuals and societies.

Problematic internet use (PIU) has emerged, from the extensive use of the internet, as a concept to describe and understand the more adverse influences of digitalization on people’s experiences. PIU refers to compulsive or excessive internet use leading to psychosocial impairments (among others, anxiety, depression, lesser well-being), and it has been studied from diverse perspectives. However, the mechanisms through which PIU could exert its impact on broader satisfaction with life (SWL) remain unclear. The present work postulates that psychological distress acts as a mediator between PIU and SWL. This hypothesis is tested in large participant groups (N = 7,536), representative of the normative population of six European countries in terms of age and gender. In the context of full structural equation modeling, analyses of direct and indirect effects show evidence for partial mediation of psychological distress between PIU and SWL, with the small positive direct effect of PIU on SWL reversing its valence to moderate and negative via the mediation of psychological distress in all six countries. These findings show that psychological distress is relevant to consider both in trying to define the limits of PIU as a construct and in considering its impacts on SWL in general.

Digital devices are marketed as tools to improve efficiency and save time, however their use is also often associated with time pressure, time poverty and reduced wellbeing. Precisely how and why digital technologies reduce the availability of time is largely unknown. This study sought to explore the ways in which people experience a loss of time as a result of digital technology use. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 300 people from Spain, Poland, Czechia, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Thematic analysis of the interview data revealed that digital technology use impacted the way in which time was used, monitored and evaluated. Participants associated digital technology use with a loss of time, a desire to fill all time, a propensity to forget time and, as a result, a desire to gain greater control of time. As a result, the experience of loss of time to digital technology was associated with feelings of guilt, shame and a lack of self-control. The findings suggest that a combination of structural factors, including imperfect algorithm content provision and ease of device use, and attitudinal factors, including the belief that digital time was inauthentic, unintellectual or “bad for you”, lead to the perception of time loss through digital device use. Improvements in algorithmic content generation and greater acceptance of the benefits of time on digital media may help reduce the sense that time is lost to digital technology, and the associated feelings of guilt and loss of control.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns triggered worldwide changes in the daily routines of human experience. The Blursday database provides repeated measures of subjective time and related processes from participants in nine countries tested on 14 questionnaires and 15 behavioural tasks during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2,840 participants completed at least one task, and 439 participants completed all tasks in the first session. The database and all data collection tools are accessible to researchers for studying the effects of social isolation on temporal information processing, time perspective, decision-making, sleep, metacognition, attention, memory, self-perception and mindfulness. Blursday includes quantitative statistics such as sleep patterns, personality traits, psychological well-being and lockdown indices. The database provides quantitative insights on the effects of lockdown (stringency and mobility) and subjective confinement on time perception (duration, passage of time and temporal distances). Perceived isolation affects time perception, and we report an inter-individual central tendency effect in retrospective duration estimation.