Does the mood lighten or darken as the clock goes back? Britons urged to participate in the study
Does the prospect of dark evenings make you gloomy, or will you enjoy an extra hour in bed? Scientists are launching a study to better understand how the annual switch to winter time affects people’s well-being and time perception – and they need your help.
In Great Britain, the clocks must turn back at 2 a.m. on Sunday, October 27. Previous studies have largely focused on the negative effects of the spring transition to daylight saving time (DST) on people’s sleep, cognitive performance, and accident proneness, but less is known about the impact of the fall change—or how these biannual events affect our influence health. perception of the passage of time.
“I would like to try to understand what it feels like when your daily sense of time is disrupted by an external force: do you feel like you have more or less time, and a higher or lower level of well-being? said Prof. Ruth Ogden from Liverpool John Moores University, who is leading the study.
“Time is a hugely overlooked part of psychology. Our lives are structured by a clock and we all have an internal representation of time, yet we have a very poor understanding of how people perceive time and whether we could potentially change people’s experience of time to create improvements in well-being.”
The study is part of a broader project that investigates how external disruptions can influence people’s sense of time. Ogden became interested in this area of research after being involved in a car accident in college that left her feeling like time was passing more slowly.
She has since explored how other emotionally salient events – including Covid lockdowns – can distort people’s perception of time. “I found that people who coped well and had less anxiety, depression or stress experienced a relatively quick lockdown, while those with a slow lockdown were those who were more socially isolated, depressed or less satisfied with their lives. levels of social interaction,” Ogden said.
Separate research has found that people struggling with chronic pain also experience a distorted sense of time. “It raises the interesting idea that our experience of time is embedded in trauma,” says Ogden.
The study is open to all British adults and involves completing a online survey about their daily lives and the amount of time pressure they experience. It can be completed the week before or after the clock change, or both.
One question Ogden and her colleagues hope to answer is whether socially marginalized groups, or people who struggle with time pressure, such as busy parents, experience changing the clock differently than people who have more control over their time.
“We are particularly interested in the relationship between time and power, and how when other people have control over time, this can create different forms of injustice for certain groups,” says Prof. Patricia Kingori, sociologist at the University’s Ethox from Oxford. Centre, who heads the total project.
For example, Kingori and Brazilian colleagues work with women whose children experience long-term problems as a result of contracting the Zika virus. Under international law, there is only a short period in which such individuals can bring a claim against the state, “but when people have experienced trauma, they are often unable to muster the resources to get things done in time to meet meet this deadline. , although they may also feel like time has passed more slowly,” she said.
Another example is the societal pressure that many women feel to have children during a very limited period of their childbearing lives – usually between their mid-20s and mid-30s. “I have worked with both teenage mothers and older women attending IVF clinics, and one of the interesting things is that in both cases women often felt that they had been caught at the ‘wrong time’, even though biologically they had can have children. ” said Kingori. “Time control is a kind of soft power that acts on us in ways that often leave us feeling late, inadequate, or not quite right, and yet we often don’t see it as a form of power.”
The long-term goal of the project is to identify strategies that can help address such inequalities, potentially leading to improvements in individual and societal well-being.
“To me, the clock change gives us a little insight into what happens when time changes for everyone, but for you it hasn’t changed quite the same way, or if society puts a limit on your time,” Ogden said. “It also raises interesting ideas, like should we have a human right to time?”