• Question: What kind of words make the pupils get bigger/smaller and why?

    Asked by Maisie Williams to Wil on 15 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by eva, 998dech43.
    • Photo: Wilhelmiina Toivo

      Wilhelmiina Toivo answered on 15 Mar 2017:

      This is a really good question, thanks Maisie! 🙂 Pupil dilation (pupil going bigger) or contraction (pupil going smaller) is an automatic reaction of your body. Research has shown that pupil size is sensitive to emotional things; these can be words or sounds or pictures. In the research language, these are called ’emotionally arousing stimuli’, because they activate your nervous system. This activation then leads to different body reactions, such as your skin conducting more electricity, or your pupils dilating.

      The words that we have found to make your pupils dilate are rated really high on emotional arousal by many people. These words usually include extremely positive words, such as mother or romance, or extremely negative words such as insanity or cancer. If you are curious to see the list that we are using, you can download the spreadsheet (called affective ratings) from this website: http://crr.ugent.be/archives/1003
      If you then sort the data by column called “A.Mean.Sum” from highest to lowest, you can see which words people think are the most emotional 🙂

      I hope this answers your question! 🙂

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