Metacognitive Questionnaire on Time : Feeling of the passage of time

The aim of our studies was to design a Metacognitive Questionnaire on Time (MQT) that assesses inter-individual variations in the awareness of factors affecting the experience of the passage of time. In the first study, 532 youngadultswere askedto reply to an initialquestionnaire consistingof 106questions relating to many different factors (e.g., psychostimulant, body temperature, age, attention) that could affect howtime is perceived. Factorial analyses allowed us to extract two discriminant factors, one relating to attention and the other to emotion. The second study sought to validate the final 24-item questionnaire by gathering data from 212 university students. Confirmatory Factorial Analyses (AMOS) showed that the MQT has the same two-factor structure. The third study assessed the construct validity of the MQT by measuring the correlation between theMQT scores and the scores with other questionnaires measuring close or different constructs. In sum, these studies enabled us to develop an easy-to-use questionnairewhereby it is possible to distinguish between individuals according to their subjective feeling of the passage of time. In addition, the participants’ responses on the MQT showed that they were more aware of attention-related factors than of emotion-related factors that might produce time distortions, and thatwomenwere more aware of their own temporal distortions than men.