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Abstract

This commentary provides an assessment of the article “Analysing movies to rethink the psychology of time” written by Paul Stenner and Tania Zittoun. Their article makes a relevant contribution to expanding our understanding—and potential use—of time in psychology through a re-working of Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopes. The authors move beyond the conventional distinction between minor and major chronotopes by recovering Bakhtin’s classification of chronotopes into created, creating, and creative ones. In doing so, they employ this classification to describe the time-space experience of engaging with art, with a particular focus on appreciating films. This commentary aims to (1) situate the authors’ contribution within the broader psychological literature, (2) extend their chronotopic analysis to the appreciation of classic experiments in psychology, and (3) discuss its potential for research practice. Overall, I conclude that experiments in psychology—like aesthetic objects—can function as liminal affective technologies that construct distinct configurations of time-space whilst claiming to reveal timeless truths.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Request permissions for this article.
Publisher Keywords:	Bakhtin, chronotopes, liminality, Milgram, temporality
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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