ArticleFrontiers in neurology2018
Arousal Effects on Pupil Size, Heart Rate, and Skin Conductance in an Emotional Face Task.
Article in Frontiers in neurology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 101 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
101 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Looking at Social Interactions in Medical Education with Dual Eye-Tracking Technology: A Scoping Review.MedEdPublish (2016) · 2024Pooled it
- Inconclusive evidence that breathing shapes pupil dynamics in humans: a systematic review.Pflugers Archiv : European journal of physiology · 2023Pooled it
- Practice improves older adults' attentional control and prospective memory more than HD-tDCS: a randomized controlled trial.Scientific reports · 2024Trial
- Network activation and its association with perceived stress underlie performance under stressful high demand.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Pre-stimulus pupil-linked arousal enhances initial stimulus availability and accelerates decay in iconic memory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Site-Dependent Patterns of Affective Interference Control and Inhibitory Braking Following Auricular Stimulation.Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback · 2026Article
- Autonomic Dysregulation in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Simultaneous Assessment of Electrodermal, Cardiac, and Oculomotor Responses to Triggering Videos-An Exploratory Study.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Cognitive functions of the GPe.Trends in neurosciences · 2026Review
- Interpersonal Synchronization of Autonomic Physiology via Mere Visual Contact.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- The anterior cingulate cortex modulates pupil-linked arousal.Science advances · 2026Article
- Neural Oscillations Track Subjective and Pupillary Arousal During Naturalistic Movie Viewing.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Frontal theta phase modulates asymmetric posterior neural mechanisms of spatial attention.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Linking reaction time variability to physiological markers of arousal across timescales.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- The Contribution of the Locus Ceruleus-Norepinephrine System to the Coupling between Pupil-Linked Arousal and Cortical State.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Global and Selective Effects of Auditory Attention on Arousal: Insights From Pupil Dilation.Journal of cognition · 2026Article
- Physiological correlates and predictors of vasovagal responses following dry needling in myofascial pain syndrome: a controlled observational study.Therapeutic advances in musculoskeletal disease · 2026Article
- Cognitive state monitoring for neuroadaptive information visualization.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
- Stressful urban walks: an experimental design for measuring physiological and psychological stress in virtual urban environments.Virtual reality · 2026Article
- Physiological and Behavioral Response Differences Between Video-Mediated and In-Person Interaction.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
41 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Arousal level changes constantly and it has a profound influence on performance during everyday activities. Fluctuations in arousal are regulated by the autonomic nervous system, which is mainly controlled by the balanced activity of the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems, commonly indexed by heart rate (HR) and galvanic skin response (GSR), respectively. Although a growing number of studies have used pupil size to indicate the level of arousal, research that directly examines the relationship between pupil size and HR or GSR is limited. The goal of this study was to understand how pupil size is modulated by autonomic arousal. Human participants fixated various emotional face stimuli, of which low-level visual properties were carefully controlled, while their pupil size, HR, GSR, and eye position were recorded simultaneously. We hypothesized that a positive correlation between pupil size and HR or GSR would be observed both before and after face presentation. Trial-by-trial positive correlations between pupil diameter and HR and GSR were found before face presentation, with larger pupil diameter observed on trials with higher HR or GSR. However, task-evoked pupil responses after face presentation only correlated with HR. Overall, these results demonstrated a trial-by-trial relationship between pupil size and HR or GSR, suggesting that pupil size can be used as an index for arousal level involuntarily regulated by the autonomic nervous system.
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