How Facial Attractiveness Affects Time Perception: Increased Arousal Results in Temporal Dilation of Attractive Faces.

Time perception plays a fundamental role in people's daily life activities, and it is modulated by changes in environmental contexts. Recent studies have observed that attractive faces generally result in temporal dilation and have proposed increased arousal to account for such dilation. However, there is no direct empirical result to evidence such an account. The aim of the current study, therefore, was to clarify the relationship between arousal and the temporal dilation effect of facial attractiveness by introducing a rating of arousal to test the effect of arousal on temporal dilation (Experiment 1) and by regulating arousal via automatic expression suppression to explore the association between arousal and temporal dilation (Experiment 2). As a result, Experiment 1 found that increased arousal mediated the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces; Experiment 2 showed that the downregulation of arousal attenuated the temporal dilation of attractive faces. These results highlighted the role of increased arousal, which is a dominating mechanism of the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces.

Applicability of Geomorphic Index for the Potential Slope Instability in the Three River Region, Eastern Tibetan Plateau.

Geomorphic indices (e.g., the normalized channel steepness index (Ksn) and the stream length-gradient index (SL)) highlight changes in fluvial shapes and gradients. However, the application of these indices was seldom used to identify potential landslide zones. In this study, we used the Ksn and SL indices to detect the significant variations in the stream power along river reaches, which are anomalies associated with landslides, in the Zengqu River watershed, the upper reaches of the Jinsha River. Most of the landslide anomalies originate along the trunk and surrounding tributaries below the knickpoint of the mainstream. This suggests an erosional wave is migrating upstream throughout the drainage area. The fluvial incision may generate over-steepened hillslopes, which could fail in the future. In addition, the divide asymmetry index (DAI) predicts the direction of the divide as the headwaters migrate toward lower relief, higher elevation surfaces. Landslides are expected to occur as the unstable divide migrates. The proposed methodology can benefit the detection and characterization of potential landslide zones. It should improve hazard and risk analysis and the identification of drainage network areas associated with landslides.

Automatic Suppression Reduces Anxiety-Related Overestimation of Time Perception.

Anxiety has been found to lengthen time perception, especially the time perception of negative stimuli. This anxiety-related time overestimation is thought to be mainly associated with massively increased arousal. Suppression, which can be achieved either deliberately or automatically, has been demonstrated to be effective in reducing arousal. Consequently, the present study explored the effectiveness of both deliberate suppression (Experiment 1) and automatic suppression (Experiment 2) in reducing the time distortion in anxiety. A temporal bisection task (TBT), featuring negative and neutral pictures, was used to measure time perception, while the self-reported arousal was used to assess arousal. The deliberate suppression was manipulated by asking participants to suppress their emotional expressions; while automatic suppression was manipulated through a sentence-unscrambling task featuring suppression-related words, which can unconsciously prime suppression. The results of Experiment 1 showed that deliberate suppression did not reduce the anxiety-related time overestimation and arousal. However, Experiment 2 showed that automatic suppression significantly reduced the anxiety-related time overestimation, with significant arousal reduction being observed. In conclusion, automatic suppression, but not deliberate suppression, is effective for reducing the effect of anxiety on time perception.

Gender Differences in the Effect of Facial Attractiveness on Perception of Time.

Time perception plays a fundamental role in human social activities, and it can be influenced in social situations by various factors, including facial attractiveness. However, in the eyes of observers of different genders, the attractiveness of a face varies. The current study aimed to explore whether gender modulates the effect of facial attractiveness on time perception. To account for individual differences in esthetic standards, the critical stimuli presented to each participant were selected from an image pool based on the participant's own attractiveness judgments. In Experiment 1, men and women performed a stimuli selection task followed by a temporal reproduction task to measure their time perception of faces of different attractiveness levels and gender. To control for the potential influence of task order, Experiment 2 flipped the order of the selection and temporal tasks. Taken together, the experiments showed that both men and women exhibited longer reproduced durations for attractive opposite-sex faces than for unattractive opposite-sex faces; conversely, in the same-sex face condition, women still exhibited longer reproduced durations for attractive faces than for unattractive faces, whereas the effect of facial attractiveness on time perception among men tended to be smaller or even fail to reach significance. These results suggest that gender differences play an important role in the effect of facial attractiveness on time perception.