Pupillary responses to emotionally provocative stimuli

  • Authors:

  • Timo Partala;Maria Jokiniemi;Veikko Surakka

  • Affiliations:

  • Human-Computer Interaction Group, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, FIN-33014 University of Tampere, Finland;Human-Computer Interaction Group, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, FIN-33014 University of Tampere, Finland;Human-Computer Interaction Group, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, FIN-33014 University of Tampere, Finland and Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Tampere University Hospital, ...

  • Venue:
  • ETRA '00 Proceedings of the 2000 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

This paper investigated in two experiments pupillary responses to emotionally provocative sound stimuli. In experiment one, 30 subjects' pupillary responses were measured while listening to 10 negatively and 10 positively arousing sounds, and 10 emotionally neutral sounds. In addition, the subjects rated their subjective experiences to these stimuli. The results showed that the pupil size was significantly larger after highly arousing positive and negative stimuli than after neutral stimuli with medium arousal.In experiment two, the contents of the stimuli were more controlled than in experiment one. 22 subjects' pupillary responses were measured while listening to four negatively and four positively arousing sounds, and four emotionally neutral sounds. The results showed that the pupil size was significantly larger during negative highly arousing stimuli than during moderately arousing positive stimuli. The pupil size was also significantly larger after highly arousing negative stimuli than after moderately arousing neutral and positive stimuli.The results of the two experiments suggest that pupil size discriminates during and after different kinds of emotional stimuli. Thus, the measurement of pupil size variation my be a potentially useful computer input signal, for example, for affective computing.