We unconsciously pay more attention to someone who has dilated pupils

By Emma Young How do you know when someone else is paying attention to you? If they’re staring at you intensely, that’s a pretty obvious giveaway. But there are also far subtler signals — such as the size of their pupils. As Clara Colombatto and Brian Scholl at Yale University note in a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, our pupils automatically and uncontrollably dilate when we’re emotionally aroused, working something out, or just attending to something. Pupil size has been used as an objective indicator of all these things in a wealth of recent studies. But if another person is directing their attention towards you, you need to know about it. It might be attention that you should reciprocate, to build a relationship, or it might signal a potential threat. So, Colombatto and Scholl wondered, “If the apprehension of pupil size is so helpful to scientists, might it be similarly helpful to us in everyday life?” To investigate, they studied groups of student participants. For these screen-based studies, they manipulated the presentation of a series of images so that they only gradually became perceptible. As soon as a participant saw any part of the image emerge into their conscious awareness, they hit a key. In each of the two main studies, the participants were repeatedly exposed to versions of face and upper torso images of two men and two women. The researchers digitally manipulated the pupils so that they were eith...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Perception Social Source Type: blogs