Scientists discover that eyes mirror other people's sadness
26 May 2006
When Rod Stewart sang, "I can tell by your eyes that you've probably been cryin' forever," it may have been the size of the person's pupils, not the redness of the eyes, which gave it away. Researchers at University College London (UCL) have found that we can recognise sadness by the size of a person's pupils, but also that we subconsciously mirror their sadness in our own eyes.
The research, carried out by Dr Neil Harrison and Dr Hugo Critchley at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, was funded by the Wellcome Trust. It appears online today in the new journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Volunteers were shown a series of emotional facial expressions and asked to rate each facial expression for intensity of emotion and how positive or negative the emotion appeared. They then viewed the same faces whilst their own pupil responses were monitored. Researchers found that sad faces with small pupils were seen as more intense and caused a reduction in the pupil size of the subjects watching them.
"It's well known that in social interactions we have a tendency to mimic the body language of other people, especially those that we like, and recent evidence suggests that this mimicry may allow us to empathise with others and understand them intuitively," says Harrison. "Our study shows that this tendency extends even to automatic functions like pupil size, over which we have no conscious control."
"Even though we believe that we intuitively understand one another without much effort, it would appear that our bodies are actually constantly responding to those around us with whom we are interacting."
Harrison also found that small pupils in sad expressions activate a number of brain regions, including the amygdala, part of the brain that regulates emotions. Previous studies have shown that these areas are important in extracting socially-important information in different situations.
"Whilst these findings offer an insight into how we understand other's emotional expressions, they also suggest a mechanism that may be faulty in people with deficits in social communication and understanding, such as autism," he explains.
The team plans to explore whether pupils are also important in our understanding of other emotions such as disgust, fear and surprise, and then to explore the role of other bodily signals such as sweating and blushing in our understanding of these emotional states.
Contact details
Wellcome Trust
Craig Brierley
T +44 (0)20 7611 7329
E c.brierley@wellcome.ac.uk
UCL
Jenny Gimpel
E j.gimpel@ucl.ac.uk
T +44 (0)20 7679 973
T +44 (0)7917 271 364 (out-of-hours)
Mobile: 07990 675 947
Notes for editors
1. ' Pupillary contagion: Central mechanisms engaged in sadness processing' by Neil Harrison et al published online in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience on 26 May 2006.
2. The Wellcome Trust is the most diverse biomedical research charity in the world, spending about £450 million every year both in the UK and internationally to support and promote research that will improve the health of humans and animals. The Trust was established under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome, and is funded from a private endowment, which is managed with long-term stability and growth in mind.
3. Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. In the government's most recent Research Assessment Exercise, 59 UCL departments achieved top ratings of 5* and 5, indicating research quality of international excellence.
UCL is the fourth-ranked UK university in the 2005 league table of the top 500 world universities produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. UCL alumni include Mahatma Gandhi (Laws 1889, Indian political and spiritual leader); Jonathan Dimbleby (Philosophy 1969, writer and television presenter); Junichiro Koizumi(Economics 1969, Prime Minister of Japan); Lord Woolf (Laws 1954 – Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales), Alexander Graham Bell (Phonetics 1860s – inventor of the telephone), and members of the band Coldplay.
4. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) is a new publication from Oxford Journals. The last decade has witnessed unprecedented convergence between the social sciences and the neurosciences resulting in several new areas of study including social cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, affective neuroscience, and neuroeconomics. In each of these areas, researchers examine the social and emotional aspects of the human mind by applying the techniques from the neurosciences. SCAN provides a home for the best human and animal research that uses neuroscience techniques to understand the social and emotional aspects of the human mind and human behaviour.