Experiment In Pupilometry

Introduction:

Pupilometry is the study of how a pupil reacts to different emotions and stimuli. The research on the topic of pupilometry is scattered and fairly shallow. Related research has been conducted on facial expressions and their reaction and relation to emotion. There are some relationships to the facial expression research and pupilometry, but these relationships do not tell the whole story. Some interest has been brought up through research in the field of pupilometry and its predictive powers on emotion.

Pupilometry has to do with the dilation and contraction of the pupil relative to the stimulus or emotion being studied. In the early stages of pupil dilation research, there was intrigue as to the response of the pupil to emotional situations. That focus shifted toward information processing, and soon emotional studies were completely ignored.

One emotional study that was done questioned whether pupil size change, as a response to seeing nudity, was a general indicator of arousal. Fifty women and fifty-seven men of the heterosexual college student variety, with a mean age of 21.4 years were studied. Results of that experiment indicated that pupils did dilate significantly more for nude test group than they did for the clothed group, regardless of the sex of the subject or the sex of the pictured person. It was the study’s conclusion that the pupils dilated because of the increased emotional presence of arousal (Aboyoun and Dabbs 1998).

Often, the eyes are poetically quipped as “the window to your soul”, “mirror of you heart”, or “the gauges showing fleeting feelings and changes” (Whiteside 1974). It has been studied that facial expressions can be inhibited by cognitively trying to hide them. In a study by Ursula Hess and Robert E. Kleck, spontaneous vs. deliberate facial emotions were studied. It was concluded that people could deliberately control facial expression. Pupil reaction on the other hand is not controllable by cognitive means. The dilation and contraction of the pupils is an involuntary response based on reaction to stimulus and or emotion. Even if a person tried to hide their reaction to some stimulus physically, the size of the pupil could still be measured to observe a person’s reaction to a situation (Hess, U. and Kleck 1997).

Eckhard Hess states in his book that normal reactions to the emotion “happy” should indicate significantly larger pupil size than the emotion “mad”. He goes on to suggest that large doe-eyed pupils are seen as happy, and small beady-eyed pupils are seen as mad (Hess, E.