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, the interaction between subjective anxiety and interoceptive accuracy predicted reduced temporal accuracy, implicating an interoceptive contribution to anxiety-related time distortions. At the neural level, reproduction compared with the encoding phase increased activity in sensorimotor and parietal regions, with insula, cingulate, and striato-thalamic engagement in the Safe context. Under Threat, the encoding–reproduction differences were modest, and screams robustly recruited a salience–limbic–temporal network relative to both non-emotional tones. Together, these findings provide behavioral and neural evidence that anxiety influences time perception through its coupling with bodily awareness, highlighting interoception as a key pathway for recalibrating time perception.