It's All in the Eyes

Its been a month and a half since I posted here. There's no better way to drive people away, but that was not my intention, although I continue to keep this forum rather private for now and sporadic writing may be the way I make sure of that.

That said, a few days ago I read about a study so compelling that I feel I have to post it here. In a study involving rating the intensity of emotion expression on faces, the subjects --people who were to be the "raters"-- were shown photographs of faces and asked to rate the intensity of the emotion shown on the face. The emotions were common ones (at least for experiments), like happiness, anger and sadness. Then the experimenters manipulated nothing but the pupil of the eye, that was visible in the photograph. Now how big or how small one's pupils are are NOT under our conscious control. Meaning no matter how much I want to fake this or that emotion, I couldn't use the size of my pupils to do it. I might be able to fake a smile, but not pupil size.

Three photographs of the same face were shown. Each of the three faces differed, only by pupil size. In one it was big, in one medium, and in one small. Then the raters were asked to estimate the emotion and intensity of the emotion. In sadness (and only in sadness) the raters significantly rated the photo with the face with smaller pupils as more intensly sad.

Additionally the experimenters got a general empathy score for each rather, using a standard empathy measure. They found that those who were more empathic in general, were more often rating the smaller pupil as sadder, meaning they were more tuned in to this signal of intensity than other raters.

This study got my head spinning. For many years, whenever questioned, Paul Ekman, a leading emotion researcher, had insisted that guilt was not a pure emotion, because there was no, clear and cross cultural muscular display of guilt, that would be systematically identified by raters. This he took to mean that guilt was a composite of different emotions. This didn't make sense to me, but who was I to argue with a major authority. Lets face it, I argued anyway, but had no evidence for my own conclusion, that guilt is indeed a pure and universal emotion. Upon reading this article this week, the light dawned --guilt might be conveyed in the eyes, by pupil size or some other special feature of which we are entirely unaware, as experiencers, or as raters, those responding to the gestures of emotions. And what else is communicated by our pupils, over which we have no control. We know that people make instantaneous snap decisions about people they meet for the first time. How does that happen? We can read book after book telling us how to make a good first impression, but something is always missing. Of course it is. Our pupils change without conscious awareness, and we read faces, also without conscious awareness.

It's all in the eyes.

Harrison, N.A., Wilson, C. E., & Critchely, H.D. (2007). Processing of Observed Pupil Size Modulates Perception of Sadness and Predicts Empathy. Emotion, vol 7, #4, 724-729.