Evaluation of Stressed Condition using Pupillary Responses

Abstract

We investigated an effective method for evaluating chronic stress in humans by using pupillary responses to visual motion stimuli. Nine subjects watched movies including 18 short video movies (duration:10s in each). The pupil diameter responding to the movies were measured with a video oculography and calculated the difference between the maximum and minimum pupil diameters responded to the stimuli was highly correlated with the salivary α-amylase (R=-0.76, p=0.018) activities. The sympathetic nervous system is activated by a stress and secretes the salivary amylase. We found that there were some autonomic different responses in the stress subject from pupillary and salivary observations. These phenomena were clearly observed under the visual movie stimulation which was able to reveal the steady pupillary responses.