The Eye is Listening: Music-Induced Arousal and Individual Differences Predict Pupillary Responses

Abstract

Pupillary responses are a well-known indicator of emotional arousal but have not yet been systematically investigated in response to music. Here, we measured pupillary dilations evoked by short musical excerpts normalized for intensity and selected for their stylistic uniformity. Thirty participants (15 females) provided subjective ratings of music-induced felt arousal, tension, pleasantness, and familiarity for 80 classical music excerpts. The pupillary responses evoked by these excerpts were measured in another thirty participants (15 females). We probed the role of listener-specific characteristics such as mood, stress reactivity, self-reported role of music in life, liking for the selected excerpts, as well as of subjective responses to music, in pupillary responses. Linear mixed model analyses showed that a greater role of music in life was associated with larger dilations, and that larger dilations were also predicted for excerpts rated as more arousing or tense. However, an interaction between arousal and liking for the excerpts suggested that pupillary responses were modulated less strongly by arousal when the excerpts were particularly liked. An analogous interaction was observed between tension and liking. Additionally, males exhibited larger dilations than females. Overall, these findings suggest a complex interplay between bottom-up and top-down influences on pupillary responses to music.

Psychophysiological Indices of Music-Evoked Emotions in Musicians

“…Thus, our study provides new knowledge by adopting a two-dimensional framework in concert with diverse psychophysiological measures (cf. Gingras, Marin, Puig-Waldmüller, & Fitch, 2015) to better examine multiple components of music-evoked emotional experiences.…”

“…Finally, by collecting subjective ratings and physiological measures from separate groups of listeners, we were able to mitigate the influence of subjective rating tasks on physiological responses. This issue has been discussed as a shortcoming of previous psychophysiological studies in music and emotion, and some authors have suggested that concurrently performing a task might alter the physiological results Psychophysiological Indices of Musical Emotions 12 (Gingras, et al, 2015;White & Rickard, 2015) in addition to behavioral demand characteristics.…”

Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Modulation of Pupillary Unrest

“…Hess and colleagues reported that human pupils dilate in response to appealing images and statements (Hess and Polt, 1960;Hess, 1965;Hess et al, 1965). Since then, pupillometric investigations have been used in numerous studies to investigate emotional responses to visual (Bradley et al, 2008) or auditory presentation (Partala and Surakka, 2003;Gingras et al, 2015). Dilation of the pupils can also indicate cognitive load (Steinhauer et al, 2004;Eckstein et al, 2017).…”

Peer Review #2 of "Cortical modulation of pupillary function: systematic review (v0.1)"

“…Pupillary dilatation results also from pleasant sounds and melodies. Known music tracks enhance pupillary diameters but not unknown and less salient melodies [155][156][157][158][159][160][161][162] . Finally, measures of pupillary diameter may also reveal active mental efforts associated with coping strategies such as reappraisal or suppression of negative emotions 163 164-171 .…”