Acute stress enhances pupillary responses to erotic nudes: Evidence for differential effects of sympathetic activation and cortisol

Pupil size variation as a response to stress in European catfish and its application for social stress detection in albino conspecifics

“…In fish, increased cortisol concentrations are usually accompanied by other stress indicators, such as intensified gill ventilation [65] and/or subordinate behavior [2]. Both pupil dilatation and higher cortisol levels are associated with fear, stress and/or arousal, as reported in previous studies of human beings [38,39,66]. The present results showed a link among PSV, increased levels of cortisol and stress in fish and introduce a possible noninvasive method of stress detection in albino fish.…”

“…The cortisol concentration in blood plasma is often used as a physiological stress indicator [38], and an increased level is related to stress-induced pupil dilatation [39]. As reported for humans and some other mammal species, pupil size can be associated with socially induced stress [37] and cortisol levels in blood plasma [39]. These relationships have yet to be investigated in fish.…”

Measurement of Sexual Interests with Pupillary Responses: A Meta-Analysis

“…For heterosexual men, for example, all studies with partially nude stimuli in the meta-analysis also applied EyeLink eye trackers to measure pupil response (Attard-Johnson et al, 2016;De Winter et al, 2021), while none of the studies using other techniques (i.e., SMI/Tobii eye trackers, manual measurement) included comparable stimuli of in low explicitness. In contrast, fully nude stimuli were employed by studies using EyeLink (Rieger et al, 2013;Watts et al, 2018) and SMI eye trackers (Finke et al, 2018), but not by any of the studies with Tobii eye trackers or manual pupil measurement. This could provide some explanation for a larger effect being observed for studies using partially nude compared to studies using more sexually explicit stimuli (i.e., complete nudity).…”

Stress Across Generations: DNA Methylation as a Potential Mechanism Underlying Intergenerational Effects of Stress in Both Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Pre-clinical Predator Stress Rodent Models

“…This regulator mechanism limits the stress response helping return the body to homeostasis and is often referred to as the negative feedback loop (Sapolsky et al, 1985). As the term stress is ambiguous and not well defined, it is important to note that various daily events that many might interpret as innocuous or pleasurable, such as exercise or sex, evoke this canonical HPA axis stress response (Stranahan et al, 2008; Jokinen et al, 2017; Finke et al, 2018). Nevertheless, unlike sex and exercise, the stressors that satisfy Criteria A in the DSM-5, while quite varied, are traumatic, sudden, unexpected, involuntary, and uncontrollable (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Kilpatrick et al, 2013; Kessler et al, 2017).…”