Emotion lies in the eye of the listener: Emotional arousal to novel sounds is reflected in the sympathetic contribution to the pupil dilation response and the P3

Widmann, Andreas; Schröger, Erich; Wetzel, Nicole

doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.01.010

Cited by 68 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Auditory pupil responses have previously been found to be larger for arousing than neutral sound stimuli (Partala & Surakka, ; Widmann, Schroger, & Wetzel, ). Interestingly, Widmann et al () found that the initial component of this auditory pupil response (within approximately 1 s after sound onset) was related solely to stimulus novelty and not to the arousing intensity of the presented sound material. However, in our case, the auditory pupil response was not elicited by emotionally arousing material but was triggered during the anticipation of a US (or safety for CS−).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Measuring the conditioned response: A comparison of pupillometry, skin conductance, and startle electromyography

2018

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In human fear conditioning studies, different physiological readouts can be used to track conditioned responding during fear learning. Commonly employed readouts such as skin conductance responses (SCR) or startle responses have in recent years been complemented by pupillary readouts, but to date it is unknown how pupillary readouts relate to other measures of the conditioned response. To examine differences and communalities among pupil responses, SCR, and startle responses, we simultaneously recorded pupil diameter, skin conductance, and startle electromyography in 47 healthy subjects during fear acquisition, extinction, and a recall test on 2 consecutive days. The different measures correlated only weakly, displaying most prominent differences in their response patterns during fear acquisition. Whereas SCR and startle responses habituated, pupillary measures did not. Instead, they increased in response to fear conditioned stimuli and most closely followed ratings of unconditioned stimulus (US) expectancy. Moreover, we observed that startle-induced pupil responses showed stimulus discrimination during fear acquisition, suggesting a fear potentiation of the auditory pupil reflex. We conclude that different physiological outcome measures of the conditioned response inform about different cognitive-affective processes during fear learning, with pupil responses being least affected by physiological habituation and most closely following US expectancy. K E Y W O R D Sextinction, fear conditioning, pupillometry, recall, skin conductance, startle blink 2 of 16 | LEUCHS Et aL. SUPPORTING INFORMATIONAdditional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting Information section at the end of the article.How to cite this article: Leuchs L, Schneider M, Spoormaker VI. Measuring the conditioned response: A comparison of pupillometry, skin conductance, and startle electromyography. Psychophysiology. 2019;56:e13283. https://doi.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Measuring the conditioned response: A comparison of pupillometry, skin conductance, and startle electromyography

2018

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“…First, we analyzed infants' pupil dilation, an indicator of both attention to a stimulus 57 and emotional arousal in response to it 58 , including during music listening 59,60 . If the lullabies relaxed infants, then pupil size should decrease during lullabies, relative to non-lullabies -contrasting sharply with an attention account for the heart rate findings, which would predict increases in pupil size.…”

Section: Exploratory Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies

et al. 2020

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Music is characterized by acoustical forms that are predictive of its behavioral functions. For example, adult listeners accurately identify unfamiliar lullabies as infant-directed on the basis of their musical features alone. This property could reflect a function of listeners' experiences, the basic design of the human mind, or both. Here, we show that American infants (= 144) relax in response to 8 unfamiliar foreign lullabies, relative to matched non-lullaby songs from other foreign societies, as indexed by heart rate, pupillometry, and electrodermal activity. They do so consistently throughout the first year of life, suggesting the response is not a function of their musical experiences, which are limited relative to those of adults. The infants' parents overwhelmingly chose lullabies as the songs that they themselves would use to calm their fussy infant, despite their unfamiliarity. Together, these findings suggest that infants are predisposed to respond to universal features of lullabies. Music is a human universal 1-3 that appears often in the lives of infants and their families 4-8. Infants demonstrate a remarkable variety of responses to music as they develop: in the first few days of life, newborns remember melodies heard in the womb 9 ; distinguish consonant from dissonant intervals 10 ; and detect musical beats 11. Older infants differentiate synchronous movement from asynchronous movement in response to music 12 ; become attuned to the rhythms of their native culture's music by their first birthday 13 ; garner social information from the songs they hear 14,15 ; and recall music in impressive detail 16,17 after long delays 14. Why are infants so interested in music? One possibility centers on the dynamics of parent-offspring interactions. Relative to other animals, human infants are helpless; to survive, they rely on resources provided by parents and alloparents 18. Such resources, whether material (like food) or not (like attention) constitute parental investment 19. Human parental investment is routinely provided to infants in response to their elicitations, which often take the form of fussiness and crying 20. Infant-directed songs may credibly signal parental attention to infants, conveying information to infants that an adult is nearby, attending to them, and keeping them safe 21,22. Singing indicates the location, proximity, and orientation of the singer (even when the singer is not visible, as at night); and it is also costly, in that the singer could be expending their energy on some other activity. Because parental attention is a key resource for helpless infants, they likely are predisposed to attend to signals of it: infants should be particularly interested in and reassured by vocal music with features suggesting that it is directed toward them. Studies of people with genomic imprinting disorders provide a unique test of this hypothesis because these disorders are characterized by divergent behaviors related to parental investment 23,24. For example, infants with Prader-Willi syndrome eli...

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“…Accumulated evidence in humans and animals shows that pupil diameter may be a reliable marker of cognitive processing [36][37][38] . Increasing work also suggests that a temporal principal component analysis (PCA) can be used to decompose pupil measures into dissociable features that reflect distinct cognitive processes [39][40][41][42][43][44] . For instance, one recent study used PCA decomposition to show that a specific sub-component of pupil dilation is triggered just prior to the onset of memory retrieval decisions, suggesting that this response might signal the anticipation of an impending decision/response 40 .…”

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confidence: 99%

Pupil-linked arousal signals track the temporal organization of events in memory

2020

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Everyday life unfolds continuously, yet we tend to remember past experiences as discrete event sequences or episodes. Although this phenomenon has been well documented, the neuromechanisms that support the transformation of continuous experience into distinct and memorable episodes remain unknown. Here, we show that changes in context, or event boundaries, elicit a burst of autonomic arousal, as indexed by pupil dilation. Event boundaries also lead to the segmentation of adjacent episodes in later memory, evidenced by changes in memory for the temporal duration, order, and perceptual details of recent event sequences. These subjective and objective changes in temporal memory are also related to distinct temporal features of pupil dilations to boundaries as well as to the temporal stability of more prolonged pupil-linked arousal states. Collectively, our findings suggest that pupil measures reflect both stability and change in ongoing mental context representations, which in turn shape the temporal structure of memory.

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Emotion lies in the eye of the listener: Emotional arousal to novel sounds is reflected in the sympathetic contribution to the pupil dilation response and the P3

Cited by 68 publications

References 48 publications

Measuring the conditioned response: A comparison of pupillometry, skin conductance, and startle electromyography

Measuring the conditioned response: A comparison of pupillometry, skin conductance, and startle electromyography

Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies

Pupil-linked arousal signals track the temporal organization of events in memory

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