Research Program / Claims / emotions-9

Emotions do not occupy physical space, but occupy variable 'psychological space' depending on intensity: the greater the intensity, the stronger the experienced 'present moment'; strong emotions can break through the time barrier.

情绪不占据物理空间，但依强度占据可变的“心理空间”：强度越大，所体验的“当下”越强烈；强情绪可击穿时间屏障。

Concept emotions · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Supplement to questions 2 and 5: approximately 600 participants undergo a valence × arousal randomized crossover experiment, with 4 sessions per participant about a week apart. Measures include time bisection, duration reproduction, subjective time passage, and vividness of the present moment, followed immediately and after a 10-minute delay by complex span and n-back tasks. Past-event recall and future-event imagination are manipulated separately; temporal order and source memory are tested one week later. Multilevel models test whether emotional intensity predicts subsequent working memory decline. If the time barrier refers to obtaining real future information, the post-hoc random target experiment from emotions-6 must be conducted separately.
Suggested paper title
Emotional Arousal, Subjective Presence, and Working Memory Availability Across Remembered and Imagined Events
What it would overturn
Subjective time and attentional effects do not require overturning mainstream models; only the verification of obtaining uninferable information across time would challenge the assumption that future independent random events cannot provide usable information to existing records.
Candidate labs / funders
Sylvie Droit-Volet（时间知觉）; Sandrine Gil（情绪与时间判断）; Florin Dolcos（情绪、注意与记忆）; Marc Wittmann，Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Psychological space can tentatively be operationalized as attentional occupancy and subjective vividness of the present, but this is a bridging hypothesis added by the researcher; the original statement does not clarify whether the time barrier is a subjective boundary or a physical causal boundary.
Note
Duration estimation, time passage perception, vividness of the present, and future information acquisition are different outcomes. 'Future recall' should be called future episodic imagination before the event occurs; time estimation bias cannot verify breaking through physical time.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim emotions-9, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/emotions-9