Lateralisation of emotions: evidence from pupil size measurement

ABSTRACT

The way our brain processes emotional stimuli has been studied intensively. One of the main issues still under debate is the laterality of valence processing. Herein, we employed the fact that pupil size increases under conditions of higher mental effort and during emotional processing, in order to contrast three proposed hypotheses in the field. We used different manual response mapping for emotional stimuli: Participants responded with their right hand for positive and with their left hand for negative facial expressions, or vice versa. The hands position was either regular (Experiment 1) or crossed (Experiment 2) in order to rule out a “spatial-valence association” alternate explanation. A third experiment was conducted by employing a passive viewing procedure of peripheral emotional stimuli. In the first two experiments, pupil size was larger when participants responded to positive stimuli with their left hand and to negative with their right hand, compared with the opposite mapping. Results of Experiment 3 strengthen the findings of Experiments 1 and 2. These findings provide significant psychophysiological evidence for the valence hypothesis: Processing positive stimuli involves the left hemisphere, while processing negative stimuli involves the right hemisphere. These results are discussed in relation to contemporary theories of emotion processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• laterality
• valence
• pupil

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Previous studies that used emotional stimuli have shown that pupil size dynamic is a rather slow-changing process (Bradley et al., 2008; Cohen et al., 2015). For instance, Partala and Surakka (2003) found significant differences both during the stimuli presentation itself, as well as during a period of 2 s following the offset of the stimuli. Hence, similarly to previous studies, we employed long trial durations in order to maximise the ability to detect changes in pupil size. The slow-changing nature of pupil dilation also requires long inter-trial-intervals to avoid carry-over effects between the trials. In addition the experiment was self-paced since participants were allowed to blink only between trials.