![]() Evidence in the early 1960s showed that actors' faces with enlarged pupils were perceived as more attractive to observers (Bull & Shead, 1979 Hess, 1965, 1975 Stass & Willis, 1967). These cosmetic techniques are based on the long-held belief of a close link between pupil dilation and positive attitudes such as (sexual) interests and/or emotional arousal and thus of a mutual path between the actor and the observer. Nowadays, people can use cosmetic contact lenses to make the pupil appear larger (by changing the color and/or appearance of the iris). In the Middle Ages, women ingested belladonna to dilate their pupils, which was supposed to make them appear seductive. Pupillary response reflects not only the peripheral nervous system's activity in response to ambient luminance changes (i.e., the pupillary light reflex) but also the central nervous system's activity underlying cognitive functions such as attention (Eldar, Cohen, & Niv, 2013 Einhäuser, Stout, Koch, & Carter, 2008 Aston-Jones & Cohen, 2005), memory (Zokaei, Board, Manohar, & Nobre, 2019 Naber, Frässle, Rutishauser, & Einhäuser, 2013 Goldinger & Papesh, 2012), decision-making (de Gee, Knapen, & Donner, 2014 Einhäuser, Koch, & Carter, 2010), emotion (Bradley, Miccoli, Escrig, & Lang, 2008 Partala & Surakka, 2003), and interpersonal impressions and attitudes (Hess, 1965, 1975 Janisse, 1973 Hess & Polt, 1960). The overall results suggest that pupil constriction not only reflects but, as a part of self-monitoring and attribution mechanisms, also possibly contributes to facial attractiveness implicitly. When pupillary responses were manipulated implicitly by relative background luminance changes (from the prestimulus screen), the facial attractiveness ratings were in accordance with the amount of pupil constriction, which could not be explained solely by simultaneous or sequential luminance contrast. When participants were asked to judge the roundness of faces, pupil constriction still correlated with their attractiveness but not the roundness rating score, indicating the automaticity of the pupil constriction to attractiveness. Further experiments showed that the effect of pupil constriction to attractiveness judgment extended to intrinsically esthetic visual objects such as natural scene images (as well as faces) but not to line-drawing geometric figures. While human participants were making an attractiveness judgment on faces, their pupil constricted more for the more attractive (as-to-be-rated) faces. Contrary to the long-held belief of a close linkage between pupil dilation and attractiveness, we found an early and transient pupil constriction response when participants viewed an attractive face (and the effect of luminance/contrast was controlled). ![]()
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