The Time Course of the Pupillary Response to Auditory Emotions in Pseudospeech, Music, and Vocalizations.
Julie Kirwan, Deniz Başkent, Anita Wagner
PMID 40785305WHAT IT FOUND
Emotional pseudospeech and music produced larger pupil dilation than neutral sounds.
In vocalizations, sadness produced the largest sustained response, but fear and anger did not differ from neutral.
Key findings
01Pupil dilation was larger for emotional pseudospeech than neutral pseudospeech for anger, happiness, and sadness.
02In music, fear produced the largest and earliest pupil dilation, while sadness produced a slower, later-rising response.
03For vocalizations, sadness caused the largest sustained pupil dilation, but fear and anger did not differ from neutral.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used 21 healthy native Dutch adults, mostly students, with normal hearing, so it does not show what happens in patients with hearing loss, autism, or other communication disorders. The pupil response was not a pure emotion measure because participants also rated and identified the sounds, and pupil dilation can reflect autonomic arousal and cognitive effort. Stimulus durations differed across emotions and sound types, especially music fear around 1 second and sadness more than 2 seconds, so timing differences may partly reflect duration. Growth curve analysis did not account for gaze position or autocorrelation of pupil dilation. Valence and arousal ratings were treated as continuous, although the authors said an ordinal scale would have been more suited.
Declared interests
The project was supported by EU H2020 MSCA grant 675324, the ENRICH network. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use pupil dilation to infer which emotion a patient heard. Emotional pseudospeech did not separate emotion categories by time course, and fear and anger vocalizations did not differ from neutral.