Abstract:

Embodied emotion suggests that perceiving emotion involves not only a perceptual process, but also somatovisceral and motoric re-experience (Niedenthal, 2007). In time perception, recent studies manipulated action feature of emotional stimuli, familiarity of stimuli’s action, body physical state, awareness state of body as well as the interaction between body and environment, and revealed the key role of emotional embodiment indicated by imitation and potential action response on temporal judgment. Time distortions induced by emotional embodiment include duration expansion, duration contraction, and modality-specific bias in temporal order judgment. Internal clock model, awareness model, and coding efficiency hypothesis are mainly used to give explanations, but these views don‘t point out the direct mechanism of how embodiment modulates temporal processing. Future research might further discuss the crossmodal modulation of embodied emotion in time perception, the dynamic changes of embodied timing, the influence of time perception on embodied experience, meanwhile adopted neurophysiological technology to reveal neural mechanisms underlying the linkage of emotion, embodiment, and temporal processing, in order to improve and develop the relevant theories.

Key words: emotion, embodiment, time perception, imitation, action