Depression shifts time production from overproduction at short targets toward underproduction at longer ones: a registered meta-analysis

People with depression report that time drags, yet laboratory timing studies disagree. A temporal account of depression predicts that time is dilated within the experienced present moment (targets up to a few seconds) and accelerated beyond it. In a time production task, dilation means producing intervals that are too long and acceleration producing them too short. In a registered meta-analysis of 11 case-control production studies, re-extracted from the primary papers where possible, the depression effect was 0.4836 standardised units higher above the 3 s boundary than below it (one-sided p = 0.03380082115675086), with overproduction at short targets (g = -0.2851) and underproduction at longer ones (g = 0.1985), neither significant alone. The effect rose by 0.6302 per tenfold increase in duration. Re-extraction also showed that an earlier meta-analysis coded a -s production as longer than min.