On the other hand, changes in pupil size are known to be linked to cognitive processing 3, 4 during tasks that do not involve emotional stimuli. These pupillary responses were therefore described as reflecting autonomic arousal triggered by emotional stimuli 1, 2. When individuals are exposed to affective signals such as nonverbal emotional vocalizations, their pupils usually increase in size as the stimuli are perceived.
Imagine that you hear someone yelling in pain, or laughing: these emotional vocalizations may often carry no linguistic content, yet they convey immediate information about the emotional state of the speaker. Because pupil dilation (under isoluminance conditions) is almost exclusively promoted by norepinephrine (NE) release from the locus coeruleus (LC), the results suggest an important role of the LC-NE system during emotion processing. In addition, pupil response revealed properties of the decisions, such as the perceived emotional valence and the confidence in the assessment. In particular, peak pupil dilation betrayed the time of emotional selection. The results showed that during emotion recognition, the time course of pupil response was driven by the decision-making process. Participants heard human nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughing, crying) and indicated the emotional state of the speakers as soon as they had identified it. Therefore, in this study we investigated the relationship between pupil size fluctuations and the process of emotion recognition. Additionally, changes in pupil size were associated with decision making during non-emotional perceptual tasks. The processing of emotional signals usually causes an increase in pupil size, and this effect has been largely attributed to autonomic arousal prompted by the stimuli.
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