Analysis of Personality Dependent Differences in Pupillary Response and its Relation to Stress Recovery Ability

We focus sometimes on a narrow task, and at other times on a broader array of stimuli. These two kinds of attention are called exploitation and exploration, respectively. Exploitation results in parasympathetic dominance and pupil constriction, whereas exploration results in sympathetic dominance and pupil dilation. This paper presents a pre-study aimed towards finding answers to two questions in the long run: (1) Can we get clues about the personality of a person through his/her psychosensory pupillary response? (2) Can we estimate the stress recovery ability of a person through his/her psychosensory pupillary response? In this study, 13 participants watched a relaxation video embedded with a scary pop-up in between. We aimed at inducing an increase in arousal via the novelty effect. After watching the video, the participants completed the DiSC personality test. Based on the DiSC personality test results, the pupil diameter vs. frame graphs were grouped for each personality. Similarities between graphs belonging to the same personality were examined. We observed the variance between the frames 400 and 1000 (starts shortly before the scary pop-up and ends at the end of the video). The variance was the smallest for the dominant personality, and highest for the inspiring and cautious personality. Between the frames 400 and 625 (shortly before and after the scary pop-up), three distinct pupillary response patterns could be observed: A decrease, a constancy, or an increase in pupil diameter. Based on these observations, a hypothesis regarding stress recovery ability is postulated: A pupil constriction indicates a fast stress recovery ability through parasympathetic dominance, and a pupil dilation indicates a relatively slow stress recovery ability due to sympathetic dominance.

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