Does raising or lowering one's body temperature lead to different perceptions of time? And does this then control the virtual length of positive or negative emotions?
For example, individuals might drink cold beverages while watching a horror movie or sip hot tea while coding or making a plane model.
Do people drink different temperature beverages while doing certain things just because of their preference or unconsciously because it helps to get more of that certain feeling they're after?
It seems that there is a research literature on the topic of the relationship between body temperature and time perception.
Weardon and Penon-Voak (1995) present a literature review of the topic which would be worth reading if this interests you. The following quotes their abstract:
Experiments investigating timing behaviour in humans under conditions where body temperature was raised or (much more rarely) lowered, dating from 1927 to 1993, were reviewed. These tested the hypothesis that humans possess a temperature-sensitive chemical or bio!g,gical internal clock. Most studies used conditions in which subjects produced or estimated durations less than 100 sec long, probably using chronometric counting, but other experimental paradigms were sometimes employed. Data from each study were expressed in a uniform fashion, as plots of changes in the rate of subjective time (estimated from changes in timing behaviour) against changes in body temperature. In almost all cases, rate of subjective time increased when body temperature increased above normal, and decreased when body temperature was lowered below normal, although observations of the latter type were rare. The data also suggested a parametric effect of body temperature, with higher temperatures generally producing faster subjective time. Some possible mechanisms for the effects obtained were discussed, with the most promising explanation probably being that the temperature manipulation produces changes in arousal.
Aschoff (1998) also summarises some of this literature and highlights the important distinction between time frames of time perception:
From the point of view of a chronobiologist, human time perception can be divided into 2 distinct classes that differ in their interaction with the circadian system: short time intervals in the range of seconds (up to about 2 min) ... [and]... long time intervals, such as 1 h... The production of short intervals shows a negative correlation with body temperature and a positive correlation with the intensity of illumination, while the 1-h intervals are independent of both these variables. For the short time intervals, the negative correlation with body temperature has often been documented (Aschoff and Daan, 1997; Francois, 1927; Hancock, 1993; Hoagland, 1933; Pfaff, 1968; Wearden and Penton-Voak, 1995), and 2 publications give strong evidence for a positive correlation with light intensity (Aschoff and Daan, 1997; Pöppel and Giedke, 1970). With regard to the 1-h intervals, an independence of light intensity is well supported (Aschoff and Daan, 1997).
Hancock (1993) summarised the literature and discussed the proposed mechanism:
The general notion of a temperature influence on time perception may be traced to Pieron (1923,1945)[1] who suggested that "if the speed of organic processes are modified, by variation and temperature for instance, mental time will increase or decrease proportionally." It was Pieron's student Francois (1927 a, b), however, who conducted the original empirical evaluations of the proposition. Yet, it is Hoagland who is associated most frequently with this general effect, mainly because of his postulate of a chemical clock to control estimates of duration. Using both his own data and those previously collected by Francois, Hoagland (1933) proposed that estimates of duration were directly dependent on internal body temperature. He described this relationship through the Van't Hoff-Arrhenius equation, which describes the speed of a chemical reaction in relationship to its temperature in degrees Kelvin. In observing that the collective data provided a unitary slope value within this equation, Hoagland (1933) concluded that our judgments of time depend upon "an underlying chemical master reaction, implying an irreversible chemical mechanism controlling the consciousness of duration."
