How state anxious individuals estimate time retrospectively: The mediating effect of memory bias

The purpose of the present study is to explore how anxious individuals estimate time retrospectively, which may fill in a research gap of time estimation literature. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the mediating effect of memory bias on the relationship between state anxiety and retrospective time estimation. In Experiment 1, state anxiety (high and low) was manipulated by a standardized induction procedure, and retrospective time estimation was tested by the verbal estimation task. In Experiment 2, memory bias was measured by the free-recall task for the data analysis of the mediating role of memory bias in the relationship of state anxiety and retrospective time estimation. In a Supplementary Experiment, different methods were used to verify the robustness of the results in Experiment 2. The results suggest that (1) high state anxious individuals estimate a retrospective duration to be longer than low state anxious individuals, and (2) memory bias mediates the influence of state anxiety on retrospective time estimation. Our findings contribute to a deep understanding of the time distortion consequence of anxiety from a new perspective and offers important insight into the mechanism underlying the effect anxiety has on retrospective time estimation.