On October 31, 2025, the research group of Meihong Zheng from the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Science at Tsinghua University, along with collaborators, published a paper titled "The Covariation of Emotion and Passage of Time Judgments: Insights from Weibo" in the international psychology journal Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology. This study is the first to use large-scale social media corpora and natural language analysis to examine the relationship between emotion and the sense of the passage of time.
Key Research Findings
The research team developed the first Chinese semantic dictionary designed to identify expressions related to the "passage of time". Using this dictionary, they extracted relevant texts from Weibo and employed Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze emotional valence and discrete emotion types.
The results, viewed from both global and dynamic perspectives, include:
Emotional Valence: Positive emotions are positively correlated with a "fast sense of time passage," while negative emotions are positively correlated with a "slow sense of time passage".
Discrete Emotions: * Happiness is significantly and positively correlated with a fast sense of time.
Anxiety is significantly and positively correlated with a slow sense of time.
Both happiness and anxiety maintained consistent relationships with time perception across different time scales, marking the first time the unique nature of these two emotions has been revealed through a subjective time lens in a Chinese context.
Instability in Other Emotions: Other emotions, such as sadness, anger, and hope, showed unstable relationships with the sense of time passage across different time windows.
Research Significance
The study suggests that a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between emotion and subjective time requires focusing on the specificity of discrete emotions and their dynamic evolution over time.
This research provides new empirical evidence for how emotional and subjective time experiences co-vary in daily life. Methodologically, it pioneers the integration of big data and NLP into the study of psychological time, offering new tools and perspectives for the field of time perception.
Authors and Publication Information
Joint First Authors: Yanci Liu (PhD graduate from the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Science) and Jiayu Li (PhD graduate from the Department of Computer Science).
Joint Corresponding Authors: Associate Professor Meihong Zheng (Department of Psychological and Cognitive Science) and Professor Min Zhang (Department of Computer Science).
Full Citation: Liu, Y., Li, J., Han, P., Du, F., Ma, S., Zhang, M., & Zheng, M. (2025). The Covariation of Emotion and Passage of Time Judgments: Insights from Weibo. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, 19.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/18344909251390027
Faculty Profile:
Meihong Zheng
Title: Associate Professor and Doctoral Supervisor, Department of Psychological and Cognitive Science.
Research Direction: Time Perception.
