Marc Wittmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 201484 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marc Wittmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marc |
| FAMILY NAME | Wittmann |
| SIGNATURE | WITTMANN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4483-7334 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Why we feel regret and guilt about using digital technology in our free time – A European perspective
Despite the widespread use of digital technologies during free time and its potential benefits for wellbeing and recovery from work life, digital engagement is considered a low-quality form of free time that often results in significant regret and guilt. Given its increasing significance as an accessible source of relaxation and enjoyment in today’s post-COVID digitised society and the negative health consequences of chronic regret and guilt, the…
Perspectives on Time and Personality
The present paper aims to honor the memory of one of the most notable figures in psychological science over the past five decades, Philip G. Zimbardo, who sadly passed away in late 2024. To this end, we provide a multi‐perspective view on psychological time—a topic that deeply engaged Phil Zimbardo during the later stages of his prolific career. From the basic mechanisms of mental time travel to the experience of the passage of time, the phenomen…
Validation of the immersion in digital life and quality of digital experience scales in German, French, Spanish, Polish and Czech
The Quality of Digital Experience Scale (QDES) and the Immersion in Digital Life Scale (IDLS) were developed to measure positive and negative experiences of digital technology use and the extent to which different facets of life were digital. Critically, the QDES and ILDS were developed to be independent of digital device or platform, thus providing a more holistic account of digital technology use than previous measures. The objective of the cur…
Problematic Internet Use Predicts Lesser Satisfaction with Life, but Psychological Distress Acts as a Mediator
Problematic internet use (PIU) has emerged, from the extensive use of the internet, as a concept to describe and understand the more adverse influences of digitalization on people’s experiences. PIU refers to compulsive or excessive internet use leading to psychosocial impairments (among others, anxiety, depression, lesser well-being), and it has been studied from diverse perspectives. However, the mechanisms through which PIU could exert its imp…
How digital technology can steal your time
Digital devices are marketed as tools to improve efficiency and save time, however their use is also often associated with time pressure, time poverty and reduced wellbeing. Precisely how and why digital technologies reduce the availability of time is largely unknown. This study sought to explore the ways in which people experience a loss of time as a result of digital technology use. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 300 people from…
Lebenszeit verteidigen
Chronic time pressure as a predictor of symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress
Chronic time pressure is associated with reduced wellbeing. Feeling chronically harried is associated with increased experiences of the symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. The results emphasize the need for governments, employers and healthcare providers to prioritise reducing time pressure as a mechanism of improving wellbeing
New measurements of digital technology use
The scales offer reliable measurements of individuals' interactions with technology in the digital era. Their ability to capture engagement beyond frequency and duration will facilitate greater understanding of the complexities of the positive and negative impacts of digital practices on individuals and societies
Experience after Floatation-Rest
Dynamics of retrospective timing
Measuring an Ongoing State of Wakefulness
Objectives: This study aimed to develop and validate a questionnaire assessing an ongoing state of wakefulness, a psychological state occurring in secular and spiritual contexts. Wakefulness is an expansive, self-transcendent, relatively stable state of being in which a person’s perception of and relationship to the world are transformed. No such questionnaire with this specific aim and scope exists. Methods: Characteristics of wakefulness from p…
The Illusions of Time Passage
The passage of time pertains to the dynamic happening of anticipated future events merging into a present actuality and subsequently becoming the past. Philosophers and scientists alike often endorse the view that the passage of time is an illusion. Here we instead account for the phenomenology of time passage as a real psycho-biological phenomenon. We argue that the experience of time passage has a real and measurable basis as it arises from an …
Differences in Time Perspectives Measured under the Dramatically Changing Socioeconomic Conditions during the Ukrainian Political Crises in 2014/2015
The characteristics of the individual's time perspective in relation to changes in social, economic, and political conditions are of major conceptual interest. We assessed the time orientations of 1588 Ukrainian students living in two different regions (western and south-eastern Ukraine) with the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) before (2010-2013) and during (2014-2016) the socioeconomic, political, and military crises which started in …
The Blursday database as a resource to study subjective temporalities during Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns triggered worldwide changes in the daily routines of human experience. The Blursday database provides repeated measures of subjective time and related processes from participants in nine countries tested on 14 questionnaires and 15 behavioural tasks during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2,840 participants completed at least one task, and 439 participants completed all tasks in the first session. T…
Disrupting times in the wake of the pandemic
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has majorly disrupted many aspects of people's lives, provoking psychosocial distress among students. People's positive and negative attitudes towards the past, present and future were a dispositional pre-COVID-19 reality. Faced with a pandemic, people have reported disruptions in the speed of passing time. People can shift their attention more towards the past, present or future when major changes in society oc…
The Phenomenology of “Pure” Consciousness as Reported by an Experienced Meditator of the Tibetan Buddhist Karma Kagyu Tradition. Analysis of Interview Content Concerning Different Meditative States
A philosopher and a cognitive neuroscientist conversed with Buddhist lama Tilmann Lhündrup Borghardt (TLB) about the unresolved phenomenological concerns and logical questions surrounding “pure” consciousness or minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), a quasi-contentless, non-dual state whose phenomenology of “emptiness” is often described in terms of the phenomenal quality of luminosity that experienced meditators have reported occurs in deep medit…
Subjective Passage of Time during the Pandemic
Over the weeks of social isolation during the COVID -19 pandemic, people typically reported that time had passed comparably quickly. Although time might have passed slowly during moments of anxiety and boredom for some, many felt a speeding up of the passing days and weeks. Here I attempt to explain the experience of time during the pandemic with cognitive models of time perception as related to the present moment (prospective time) and in hindsi…
What happens while waiting? How self-regulation affects boredom and subjective time during a real waiting situation
Boredom is an everyday experience during uneventful situations and while waiting. Such situations are typically described as unpleasant since oneself becomes the focus of awareness, and the subjective duration expands. Self-control is an individual trait that helps to cope with unpleasant situations. Hardly any systematic studies exist on real waiting situations where people's boredom and subjective time experience are assessed in relation to sel…
A German Validation of Four Questionnaires Crucial to the Study of Time Perception
We aimed to validate four established questionnaires related to time perception in German (Consideration of Future Consequences-14 scale (CFC-14), Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS), Metacognitive Questionnaire on Time (MQT), and Self-Awareness Questionnaire (SAQ)) using a back-translation method. Exploratory factor analyses were conducted on the data of 273 German-speaking participants to evaluate the factorial structures. Internal consistencies indi…
Increased relaxation and present orientation after a period of silence in a natural surrounding
Introduction: Nature and silence and their interrelationship have been rarely-discussed topics in music therapy research. We therefore compared the experience of silence in an indoor setting (university lecture room) with silence in a natural outdoor setting (city garden).Methods: Following a non-randomized repeated-measure design, we conducted two sessions of experiencing silence (indoors and outdoors) lasting 6:30 minutes and guided by a qualif…
EEG correlates of cognitive time scales in the Necker-Zeno model for bistable perception
The Sense of Time While Watching a Dance Performance
Although the judgment of time is an important experience embedded in the context of cognitive and emotional appraisal of events, there are few studies concerning perceived time within an ecologically valid context. Watching a cultural event such as a dance performance is a paradigmatic situation in which viewers perceive time differently as a function of performance characteristics and viewers’ personal engagement. We staged two dance pieces that…
Altered states of consciousness are related to higher sexual responsiveness
Modulations of the experience of self and time
Time Perspective and Emotion Regulation as Predictors of Age-Related Subjective Passage of Time
Hardly any empirical work exists concerning the relationship between the intra-individually stable time perspective relating to the past, present, and future and the subjective speed of time passing in everyday life. Moreover, studies consistently show that the subjective passage of time over the period of the last ten years speeds up as we get older. Modulating variables influencing this phenomenon are still unknown. To investigate these two unr…
Disrupting times in the wake of the pandemic
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has majorly disrupted many aspects of people's lives, provoking psychosocial distress among students. People's positive and negative attitudes towards the past, present and future were a dispositional pre-COVID-19 reality. Faced with a pandemic, people have reported disruptions in the speed of passing time. People can shift their attention more towards the past, present or future when major changes in society oc…
Increased relaxation and present orientation after a period of silence in a natural surrounding
Introduction: Nature and silence and their interrelationship have been rarely-discussed topics in music therapy research. We therefore compared the experience of silence in an indoor setting (university lecture room) with silence in a natural outdoor setting (city garden).Methods: Following a non-randomized repeated-measure design, we conducted two sessions of experiencing silence (indoors and outdoors) lasting 6:30 minutes and guided by a qualif…
Measuring an Ongoing State of Wakefulness
Objectives: This study aimed to develop and validate a questionnaire assessing an ongoing state of wakefulness, a psychological state occurring in secular and spiritual contexts. Wakefulness is an expansive, self-transcendent, relatively stable state of being in which a person’s perception of and relationship to the world are transformed. No such questionnaire with this specific aim and scope exists. Methods: Characteristics of wakefulness from p…
The Blursday database as a resource to study subjective temporalities during Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns triggered worldwide changes in the daily routines of human experience. The Blursday database provides repeated measures of subjective time and related processes from participants in nine countries tested on 14 questionnaires and 15 behavioural tasks during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2,840 participants completed at least one task, and 439 participants completed all tasks in the first session. T…
Temporal mechanisms of the brain as fundamentals of communication — with special reference to music perception and performance
Rhythm and tempo are basic constituents of music perception and music performance. As these temporal characteristics in musical skill are controlled by mechanismsof the brain, we seek to explain them on the basis of a taxonomy of temporal processes of the central nervous system. In the presented model, two distinct mechanismsare discussed: On a high-frequency level (ca. 30 milliseconds), the brain creates successive events in perception and motor…
Age Effects in Perception of Time
Despite the widespread belief that the subjective speed of the passage of time increases with age, empirical results are controversial. In this study, a combination of questionnaires was employed to assess subjective time perception by 499 subjects, ages 14 to 94 years. Pearson correlations and nonlinear regression analyses on a variety of questionnaires and the age of the participants show that the momentary perception of the passage of time and…
Age Effects in Perception of Time
Social Jetlag
Humans show large differences in the preferred timing of their sleep and activity. This so-called "chronotype" is largely regulated by the circadian clock. Both genetic variations in clock genes and environmental influences contribute to the distribution of chronotypes in a given population, ranging from extreme early types to extreme late types with the majority falling between these extremes. Social (e.g., school and work) schedules interfere c…
First-person approaches in neuroscience of consciousness
Modulations of the experience of self and time
Time Perspective and Emotion Regulation as Predictors of Age-Related Subjective Passage of Time
Hardly any empirical work exists concerning the relationship between the intra-individually stable time perspective relating to the past, present, and future and the subjective speed of time passing in everyday life. Moreover, studies consistently show that the subjective passage of time over the period of the last ten years speeds up as we get older. Modulating variables influencing this phenomenon are still unknown. To investigate these two unr…
Altered states of consciousness are related to higher sexual responsiveness
EEG correlates of cognitive time scales in the Necker-Zeno model for bistable perception
The Sense of Time While Watching a Dance Performance
Although the judgment of time is an important experience embedded in the context of cognitive and emotional appraisal of events, there are few studies concerning perceived time within an ecologically valid context. Watching a cultural event such as a dance performance is a paradigmatic situation in which viewers perceive time differently as a function of performance characteristics and viewers’ personal engagement. We staged two dance pieces that…
Subjective Passage of Time during the Pandemic
Over the weeks of social isolation during the COVID -19 pandemic, people typically reported that time had passed comparably quickly. Although time might have passed slowly during moments of anxiety and boredom for some, many felt a speeding up of the passing days and weeks. Here I attempt to explain the experience of time during the pandemic with cognitive models of time perception as related to the present moment (prospective time) and in hindsi…
What happens while waiting? How self-regulation affects boredom and subjective time during a real waiting situation
Boredom is an everyday experience during uneventful situations and while waiting. Such situations are typically described as unpleasant since oneself becomes the focus of awareness, and the subjective duration expands. Self-control is an individual trait that helps to cope with unpleasant situations. Hardly any systematic studies exist on real waiting situations where people's boredom and subjective time experience are assessed in relation to sel…
A German Validation of Four Questionnaires Crucial to the Study of Time Perception
We aimed to validate four established questionnaires related to time perception in German (Consideration of Future Consequences-14 scale (CFC-14), Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS), Metacognitive Questionnaire on Time (MQT), and Self-Awareness Questionnaire (SAQ)) using a back-translation method. Exploratory factor analyses were conducted on the data of 273 German-speaking participants to evaluate the factorial structures. Internal consistencies indi…
Increased relaxation and present orientation after a period of silence in a natural surrounding
Introduction: Nature and silence and their interrelationship have been rarely-discussed topics in music therapy research. We therefore compared the experience of silence in an indoor setting (university lecture room) with silence in a natural outdoor setting (city garden).Methods: Following a non-randomized repeated-measure design, we conducted two sessions of experiencing silence (indoors and outdoors) lasting 6:30 minutes and guided by a qualif…
The Phenomenology of “Pure” Consciousness as Reported by an Experienced Meditator of the Tibetan Buddhist Karma Kagyu Tradition. Analysis of Interview Content Concerning Different Meditative States
A philosopher and a cognitive neuroscientist conversed with Buddhist lama Tilmann Lhündrup Borghardt (TLB) about the unresolved phenomenological concerns and logical questions surrounding “pure” consciousness or minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), a quasi-contentless, non-dual state whose phenomenology of “emptiness” is often described in terms of the phenomenal quality of luminosity that experienced meditators have reported occurs in deep medit…
The Illusions of Time Passage
The passage of time pertains to the dynamic happening of anticipated future events merging into a present actuality and subsequently becoming the past. Philosophers and scientists alike often endorse the view that the passage of time is an illusion. Here we instead account for the phenomenology of time passage as a real psycho-biological phenomenon. We argue that the experience of time passage has a real and measurable basis as it arises from an …
Differences in Time Perspectives Measured under the Dramatically Changing Socioeconomic Conditions during the Ukrainian Political Crises in 2014/2015
The characteristics of the individual's time perspective in relation to changes in social, economic, and political conditions are of major conceptual interest. We assessed the time orientations of 1588 Ukrainian students living in two different regions (western and south-eastern Ukraine) with the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) before (2010-2013) and during (2014-2016) the socioeconomic, political, and military crises which started in …
The Blursday database as a resource to study subjective temporalities during Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns triggered worldwide changes in the daily routines of human experience. The Blursday database provides repeated measures of subjective time and related processes from participants in nine countries tested on 14 questionnaires and 15 behavioural tasks during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2,840 participants completed at least one task, and 439 participants completed all tasks in the first session. T…
Disrupting times in the wake of the pandemic
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has majorly disrupted many aspects of people's lives, provoking psychosocial distress among students. People's positive and negative attitudes towards the past, present and future were a dispositional pre-COVID-19 reality. Faced with a pandemic, people have reported disruptions in the speed of passing time. People can shift their attention more towards the past, present or future when major changes in society oc…
Dynamics of retrospective timing
Measuring an Ongoing State of Wakefulness
Objectives: This study aimed to develop and validate a questionnaire assessing an ongoing state of wakefulness, a psychological state occurring in secular and spiritual contexts. Wakefulness is an expansive, self-transcendent, relatively stable state of being in which a person’s perception of and relationship to the world are transformed. No such questionnaire with this specific aim and scope exists. Methods: Characteristics of wakefulness from p…
Problematic Internet Use Predicts Lesser Satisfaction with Life, but Psychological Distress Acts as a Mediator
Problematic internet use (PIU) has emerged, from the extensive use of the internet, as a concept to describe and understand the more adverse influences of digitalization on people’s experiences. PIU refers to compulsive or excessive internet use leading to psychosocial impairments (among others, anxiety, depression, lesser well-being), and it has been studied from diverse perspectives. However, the mechanisms through which PIU could exert its imp…
How digital technology can steal your time
Digital devices are marketed as tools to improve efficiency and save time, however their use is also often associated with time pressure, time poverty and reduced wellbeing. Precisely how and why digital technologies reduce the availability of time is largely unknown. This study sought to explore the ways in which people experience a loss of time as a result of digital technology use. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 300 people from…
Lebenszeit verteidigen
Chronic time pressure as a predictor of symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress
Chronic time pressure is associated with reduced wellbeing. Feeling chronically harried is associated with increased experiences of the symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. The results emphasize the need for governments, employers and healthcare providers to prioritise reducing time pressure as a mechanism of improving wellbeing
Psychology (25 works) · Perception (14 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Time perception (14 works) · Cognitive psychology (12 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Psychological and Temporal Perspectives Research (10 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Neuroscience and Music Perception (9 works) · Cognition (8 works)