Dawson and Sleek review some of the recent research on how quickly time seems to pass in various sorts of places. As they report, “Compared with participants who completed less awe-inspiring activities, participants in the awe conditions [such as watching awe-inspiring videos…[of] waterfalls] reported feeling time passing more slowly. Additional findings…suggest that awe caused people to feel more ‘in the moment’ and led them to see time as more abundant. Nature itself may slow our sense of time…In experiments that included both virtual and actual environments, participants experienced walking through either natural surroundings such as a forest trail or bustling urban locations such as New York City…the participants in the nature condition reported feeling a slower passage of time compared with those in the urban setting. And when the researchers actually took participants for walks in either natural or urban settings, those in the nature condition reported longer objective and subjective perceptions of elapsed time.”
Research has also shown that people can be awed by a variety of different sorts of things, from videos of waterfalls to remarkable workmanship, such as the floors in the Alhambra in Granada, and the same experience can make us feel awed on multiple occasions.
Joe Dawson and Scott Sleek. 2018. “The Fluidity of Time: Scientists Uncover How Emotions Alter Time Perception.” Observer, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 24-27.
Sally Augustin, PhD,a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.