Social anxiety is characterized by persistent and excessive fear of negative evaluation by others which can lead to avoidance and physiological arousal when in social situations. Pupil size is a...Show moreSocial anxiety is characterized by persistent and excessive fear of negative evaluation by others which can lead to avoidance and physiological arousal when in social situations. Pupil size is a reliable indicator of physiological arousal and can be measured using pupillometry. Cognitive models postulate that social anxiety is related to enhanced pupil dilation, whereas empirical studies show decreased pupil dilation. This contradiction could be explained by an avoidance of processing threatening stimuli in individuals with social anxiety. Moreover, a higher degree of intimacy may lead to a higher likelihood of avoidance, resulting in greater reduction in pupil size. This study investigated the effect of social anxiety on pupil size during a face-to-face conversation task and the effect of intimacy of topic (high vs low) on this relationship. The present study had an experimental, correlational design and included 66 female participants aged between 18 and 30. Social anxiety was measured by the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale questionnaire and pupil size was recorded by wearable eye-trackers. Participants had a conversation task with a confederate consisting of 18 questions. These questions were divided in three blocks of 6, wherein block 1 and 3 were low in intimacy and block 2 was high in intimacy. For the analyses the pupil size of the left, right and average of both eyes was used. For the left-eye, right-eye and average of both eyes’ pupil size, the ANCOVA revealed no main effect of social anxiety, intimacy of topic and no interaction effect between social anxiety and intimacy of topic. In the preliminary analysis, a main effect of time was found. The current study was one of the first studies that used a face-to-face conversation task with varying levels of intimacy to investigate the relationship between social anxiety and pupil size. No significant effects were found between level of social anxiety and pupil size, as well as for the effect of intimacy of topic. However, there was a significant effect found for time, with pupil size decreasing over time in all participants. More research is needed to investigate these relationships.Show less
Dilated compared to constricted pupils have been found to increase several prosocial behaviors and impressions in interaction partners, including trust decisions, as well as ratings of friendliness...Show moreDilated compared to constricted pupils have been found to increase several prosocial behaviors and impressions in interaction partners, including trust decisions, as well as ratings of friendliness and attractiveness. Dilated pupils have also been found to decrease lying in a coin-toss game where lying harmed the other person. It has been suggested that this decrease in lying might be caused by enhanced social bonding. Since increased attractiveness has also been linked to enhanced social bonding, this study investigated, whether perceived attractiveness mediates the relationship between pupil size and lying. To investigate this, a coin-toss game has been used where the participants were asked to make private predictions about the outcome of a coin-toss. They were then asked whether or not their predictions were correct. For each correct prediction, they earned some money, and their interaction partner lost some money. For each incorrect prediction, only their partner earned some money. The passive interaction partner was a confederate wearing contact lenses with either dilated or constricted pupils. After this coin-toss game, they were asked to rate their interaction partner’s attractiveness. The relationship between pupil size and lying, as well as the mediation of attractiveness, were found to be non-significant. Therefore, attractiveness does not seem to mediate the relationship between pupil size and lying. These results do not fit earlier findings. A number of possible explanations are suggested for the unexpected results. However, more research is needed to investigate these suggestions and to fully understand the effect of pupil size on lying.Show less
Mimicry is the replication of another person’s behaviour and/or physiological state in short temporal succession of the original behaviour. It can be differentiated into autonomic mimicry and motor...Show moreMimicry is the replication of another person’s behaviour and/or physiological state in short temporal succession of the original behaviour. It can be differentiated into autonomic mimicry and motor mimicry, with the former denoting mimicry of autonomic nervous system activity such as heart rate, with visible behaviours such as blushing or pupil dilation, whereas motor mimicry is any mimicry of motor movements. Together, these two types of autonomic mimicry result in emotional mimicry, also called emotional contagion. The primary aspect of emotional mimicry is reciprocal evaluation, as people with positive affiliation towards each other exhibit it the most. However, socially anxious people have deficiencies in motor mimicry and do not prefer a mimicking partner. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate whether highly socially anxious people would evaluate virtual characters exhibiting autonomic mimicry less positively than low socially anxious individuals. Within the study, 29 people with different levels of social anxiety were exposed to autonomic mimicry through pupil dilation by three virtual characters telling three different stories, whilst three others told stories without mimicking the participants, but still exhibiting occasional pupil dilation. Comfortability around the characters was measured through the desire for future interaction scale, and liking through an avatar evaluation questionnaire. Two repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) and two mixed ANOVA were conducted and yielded no significant differences in evaluation between the mimicry conditions, nor any significant mediation of these differences by the social anxiety group, suggesting that differences in peoples’ evaluations of mimicry are primarily reserved to motor mimicry.Show less
