Pupil Dilation Reflects Emotional Arousal Via Poetic Language

Abstract

We investigated pupillary responses to the world’s shortest fixed verses, Japanese haiku as aesthetic poetry (AP) and senryu as comic poetry (CP), in comparison with non-poetry control stimuli (NP) comprised of slogans that had the same rhythm patterns. Native Japanese speakers without literary training listened to these stimuli while we recorded their pupil diameters. We found that participants’ pupils were significantly dilated for CP compared to NP in an early time window. While AP also evoked larger dilations than NP, the latency for AP-related pupil dilation was relatively long. Thus, lay people experience quick and intense arousal in response to funny and humorous words, while aesthetic properties of words may also elicit intense but slower changes in listeners’ arousal levels, presumably because they evoke more implicit and subtle emotional effects. This study is the first to provide evidence that poetic language elicits human pupillary dilation. A better understanding of the cognitive and neural substrates for the sensitive awareness of pleasures expressed via poetic language will provide insights for improving mental and physical health. Hence, pupillometry can act as a useful convenient measurement to delineate the sympathetic activation of emotional contexts via language.

Interaction between creation and appreciation: How linguistic art creation impacts the aesthetic evaluation of haiku poetry and ink paintings

“…Finally, for the slogan stimuli, traffic safety (e.g., "Bicyclists, stop and look carefully at the intersection") and taxation ("Paying the consumption tax will make your life better"). These slogans were selected from the Internet; they consisted of 5-7-5 syllables in Japanese and were structurally similar to haiku (see Niikuni et al, 2022 for a previous study that used slogan as a control stimulus).…”

Effects of Emotional and Cognitive Changes on Aesthetic Evaluation of Poetry Based on Subjective and Physiological Continuous Responses with Pupil Diameter Measurement

“…Pupil diameter was found to be largely unrelated to cognitive ambiguity, and in this study, pupil diameter was associated with emotional processes of beauty rather than cognitive processes such as the resolution of ambiguity. A recent study measuring pupil diameter compared haiku, an aesthetic poem, to senryu, a more comical poem, nding a more gradual pupil size enlargement in haiku (Niikuni et al, 2022). Because haiku requires more context and relevance judgments than senryu, the researchers interpreted pupil enlargement as not being explained by cognitive load (if cognitive load causes pupil dilation, the enlargement will occur more quickly in haiku) but by heightened emotion.…”

“…In haiku, one or two images are composed, and a breakpoint called a kire (cut) [1] is e ciently used to integrate the two images into a work (Blasko & Merski, 1998). While the Japanese are naturally comfortable with the 5-7-5 rhythm (Niikuni et al, 2022), rhymes are not common in haiku. With its controlled format and clear rules, haiku poetry has the potential to explore the frontier of linguistic art, which has many unexplored elements compared to the accumulated research in visual and auditory arts (cf., micropoem (Hugentobler & Lüdtke, 2021;Jacobs, 2015).…”