The Emotional Experience of Time: Effects of Anxiety and Interoceptive Ability on Temporal Perception

Our experience of time is deeply shaped by emotional and bodily states. Anxiety is known to distort our temporal perception, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we tested whether interoception links anxiety to variability in timing. Thirty participants underwent fMRI while performing a temporal reproduction task within a modified Threat of Scream paradigm. Safe and Threat blocks alternated, with aversive screams unpredictably delivered during Threat blocks. Screams reliably increased subjective anxiety and engaged salience and limbic regions, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and insula. Despite these affective and neural responses, Threat did not produce systematic changes in temporal accuracy. Instead, individuals with higher interoceptive accuracy tended to preserve reproduction accuracy under elevated anxiety, implicating an interoceptive contribution to anxiety-related variability in timing. At the neural level, reproduction compared with the encoding phase increased activity in sensorimotor and parietal regions, with engagement of the insula, cingulate, and striato-thalamic regions in the Safe context. Under Threat, the same contrast encompassed a more circumscribed set of sensorimotor and parietal regions, and screams robustly recruited a salience-limbic-temporal network relative to both non-emotional tones. Together, these findings suggest that individual differences in interoceptive accuracy may moderate the relationship between anxiety and temporal reproduction, and characterize the neural response to threat during a timing task.