Logical and experiential time in narratives

Abstract

In cognitive psychological research, time includes two main subcategories: experiential (temporal experiences) and logical (temporal reasoning). Our research focuses on estimations of experiential and logical time in narrative text reading in relation to emotion. In Study One, participants read an emotionally positive and a negative text and the actual and estimated duration of the reading activity were compared. Results showed that the duration of reading the unpleasant text was overestimated as compared to the pleasant one. In Study Two, participants of Study One were asked to read another positive or negative text, but this time they were asked to estimate the duration of the described events in the text (logical time). Results showed that, although participants again garnered emotion information from text, this did not affect their estimations of the narrative events' duration, thus revealing that time and emotion are differently intertwined in the case of narrative text reading. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.