Pupillary responses to emotionally provocative stimuli

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.