Emotional tone distorts remembered durations of naturalistic activities

Plans for upcoming activities are likely to be affected by the remembered durations for the to-be-planned activities. Such duration estimates in turn might be influenced by the emotional experiences associated with each activity. In the current work, we aimed to characterize how emotions can affect duration judgments. Participants (N = 204, data collection 2023-2024) completed 10 different real-world activities that varied in duration and made judgments of each activity's valence and arousal. Three days later, participants completed an online follow-up survey where they estimated how long each activity lasted and how they remember feeling about each activity (again in terms of valence and arousal). Generally, our results indicated that both low and high levels (relative to moderate levels) of arousal or valence prolonged remembered duration judgments. Also, remembered emotional judgments tended to be more important for duration estimates than emotions experienced during the activities themselves. Individual differences in self-report measures of self-control affect duration estimates indirectly: Higher levels of self-control appeared to mute emotional effects on duration estimates. We interpret our results in line with known attentional effects of emotions on memory and effects of memory accuracy on duration judgments. Our results also suggest that emotions reconstructed during retrieval are generally more important for temporal memories than the initially encoded emotional experiences. Generalizability of conclusions is limited by the range of activities, evaluated durations, the delay between encoding and retrieval, and our use of a student population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).