Research Design Connection: Place and Time

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | February 18th, 2019

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 …