Manuela Marin sitting in front of the eye tracker, with an image of her right pupil displayed on the screen (Copyright: Bruno Gingras).
When people are listening to music, their emotional reactions to the music are reflected in changes in their pupil size. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, are the first to show that both the emotional content of the music and the listeners' personal involvement with music influence pupil dilation. This study, published in the scientific journal "Frontiers in Human Neuroscience", demonstrates that pupil size measurement can be effectively used to probe listeners' reactions to music. The pupil size reflexively adjusts to the amount of ambient light, contracting in bright daylight and dilating at night. However, pupil size is also modulated by thoughts, emotions, or mental effort. For instance, the pupil dilates in response to sexually explicit images, or when trying to solve a difficult mental computation. Sounds may also evoke pupil dilations, depending on their emotional content.
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