Duration of Emotions

In this article, we want to touch on a topic that isn’t often discussed, but is no less important for that! Assessing a person’s face, emotions, and moods plays a significant role in profiling and lie detection. Beyond these specialized fields, it’s also crucial to understand the emotional state of your conversation partner during any communication, as this can determine the direction the conversation will take. Is the person ready to listen, open to your opinion, likely to defend their interests to the end, or simply uninterested in the topic? This leads to an important question: how long will someone remain in a particular emotional state? If we can see patterns in a person’s behavior, we can predict their actions—and if we can predict behavior, we can manage the system.

Terminology

In previous articles, we’ve discussed each of the basic emotions in detail—their criteria, causes, and how they appear on the face—but we haven’t really addressed the duration of these emotions. To better understand this aspect, let’s recall the definition of emotions and introduce a few new concepts to complete the picture:

• Basic emotions – Emotions that are expressed similarly by people from different cultures and continents. All basic emotions have a structure, criteria, and a cause.
• Emotions – Chains of events with stabilizing feedback loops that maintain behavioral homeostasis. Environmental events (stimuli) are cognitively evaluated, resulting in experiences (emotions) accompanied by physiological changes. The body then responds with behavior aimed at affecting the stimulus.
• Microexpressions – Brief, involuntary facial expressions that appear when a person tries to hide or suppress an emotion.
• Affect – An explosive emotional process characterized by short duration and high intensity, accompanied by pronounced motor activity and changes in internal organ function.
• Mood – A relatively long-lasting emotional process of low intensity, forming the emotional background for ongoing mental processes.

Now that we’ve defined these terms, we can discuss them more specifically and in detail.

Duration of Emotional Manifestations

The definitions themselves already hint at how long each emotional manifestation typically lasts, but let’s look at each one in more detail so we can better recognize and distinguish them.

Duration of Microexpressions

Microexpressions are unique because they cannot be consciously controlled. They appear when a person tries to hide their true feelings. Since they can’t be deliberately reproduced, microexpressions are a reliable source of information about a person’s current emotional state. This is a key difference from emotions, which we can consciously simulate. Another difference is their duration. On average, a microexpression lasts about 0.5 seconds, but there’s more nuance:

• The shortest microexpressions (about 1% of all) last less than 1/30 of a second—these are the most fleeting and hardest to notice.
• About 30% of microexpressions last around 1/4 of a second.
• The rest last from 1/4 to 0.5 seconds.

Duration of Emotions

Emotions arise in response to stimuli from the outside world. They can be positive, negative, or conditionally neutral (like surprise). Emotions also differ in intensity—the stronger the emotion, the more pronounced its physiological effects. For example, joy and anger prompt active behavior and mobilize energy, while sadness drains us of energy and resources. Our behavior changes depending on the emotion we experience. A genuine, unrestrained emotion typically lasts from 0.5 to 4 seconds. The exception is surprise, which is a neutral, evaluative emotion. When surprised, we need to quickly classify what we’ve encountered and determine if it’s dangerous, pleasant, or unpleasant. Because the main purpose of surprise is to assess a new stimulus as quickly as possible, genuine surprise is the shortest-lasting emotion—no more than one second. This is important, as the duration of surprise is a key indicator of its authenticity. If you share new information and your conversation partner shows strong surprise for several seconds, it’s likely they’re only pretending to be surprised.

Duration of Affect

Affect is a more intense process than emotion, but still relatively short-lived, though longer than a typical emotion. The duration of affect depends on the underlying emotion, the intensity of the event, and the strength of the individual’s nervous system. For example, someone with a strong nervous system has more internal resources to withstand stress, so their affect may last longer than someone with a weaker nervous system, who has fewer resources and can’t remain in such an energy-draining state for long. Therefore, to determine the duration of affect, you need to consider several factors: the emotion involved, the intensity of the experience, and the strength of the nervous system. Depending on these, affect can last from a few seconds to several minutes.

Duration of Mood

Mood is a long-lasting but low-intensity process. It reflects a person’s attitude toward their life situation. Unlike emotion or affect, mood may have little or no outward expression. Moods can be stable, low, elevated, anxious, and so on. Every mood has a cause, even if it’s not always recognized. Prolonged bad moods (lasting two weeks or more) can lead to depression. In terms of duration, mood has no clear boundaries—it can last from several hours to several weeks. It’s also important to note that while in a certain mood, we unconsciously seek external confirmation of our state. For example, someone in a good mood will focus more on positive aspects of life, which helps maintain their mood, while someone in a bad mood will notice more negatives in the world around them.

Why Understanding the Duration of Emotional Processes Matters

By understanding how long emotional processes last, you can more accurately assess the emotional state of others, understand their motives, and interpret their reactions to what’s happening around them. This allows you to communicate more effectively and present information in a way that’s most accessible and comfortable for the other person. Don’t forget to analyze your own emotions as well! We often ignore our own feelings, or don’t even think about them, but emotions have a strong impact on our behavior. By understanding what we’re feeling and what state we’re in, we can better control ourselves.