The Body Keeps Time: How Heart Rate Bends the Sense of Duration
- Team from the Center for Bioelectric Interfaces, HSE University (Moscow); 38 analysed adults (40 recruited, 2 excluded; predominantly young, mean age around 22) watched 36 short video clips designed to elicit positive, negative or neutral emotion while duration-estimation errors, normalized heart rate and subjective ratings were recorded; data analysed with linear mixed models and Bayesian mediation.
- Emotional content significantly shaped time perception: negative and neutral clips were underestimated in duration, while positive clips produced smaller estimation errors.
- Heart rate partially mediated the effect of emotion on time perception; slower heart rates were linked to greater underestimation of durations.
- Contrary to earlier reports, interoceptive accuracy showed no correlation with time-perception precision; an internal focus of attention was associated with greater underestimation and lower normalized heart rate, with no interaction between attention, heart rate and emotional valence.
Distorted time is one of the most common things patients describe and one of the least measured. The depressed patient for whom an afternoon "lasts forever," the panic patient for whom seconds stretch, the dissociating patient for whom an hour vanishes. This study asks where that distortion is generated, and locates a share of it below cognition, in the beating heart.
What the data shows
Participants watched 36 emotionally calibrated clips while the researchers tracked how far their duration estimates drifted from clock time, alongside normalized heart rate and self-report. Two effects were robust. First, emotional valence moved time: negative and neutral material was judged as shorter than it was, positive material was judged more accurately. Second, and more interesting for a body-oriented reading, heart rate partially carried that effect. When the heart slowed, durations were underestimated more strongly. The body's pacemaker behaved, in part, like an internal clock.
Two null results discipline the enthusiasm. Interoceptive accuracy, how well a person actually tracks their heartbeat, did not predict how precisely they judged time. And an internal focus of attention shifted time estimates and lowered heart rate, but did not interact with emotional valence. The authors read the whole pattern as evidence that these are largely subconscious mechanisms, not something the patient can introspect on demand.
For your practice
The clinical value is a reframe. When a patient reports that time behaves strangely, treat it as a possible readout of autonomic state, not only of mood or cognition. A slowed, downregulated body and an inward-turned attention both pull duration judgments toward underestimation, which is worth remembering with dissociative and depressive presentations where the felt tempo of life collapses. The accuracy null is the practical caution: a patient can be poor at detecting their own heartbeat yet still have their time sense driven by cardiac signals they never consciously register. Do not assume that "getting better at noticing the body," the goal of much interoceptive work, will straighten out distorted time.
When the heart slows, the felt clock slows with it, and much of that happens beneath anything the patient can report.
The sample was non-clinical, small (n=38) and predominantly young, and the mediation by heart rate was weak: the indirect effect was far smaller than the direct effect, so heart rate carries only a fraction of the emotion-to-time link. This is an experimental correlation-and-mediation design, not a causal manipulation of the heart.