Small Pupils Lead to Lower Judgements of a Person’s Characteristics for Exaggerated, but Not for Realistic Pupils

Our eyes convey information about a person. The pupils may provide information regarding our emotional states when presented along with different emotional expressions. We examined the effects of pupil size and vergence on inferring other people’s characteristics in neutral expression eyes. Pupil sizes were manipulated by overlaying black disks onto the pupils of the original eye images. The disk area was then changed to create small, medium, and large pupils. Vergence was simulated by shifting the medium-sized disks nasally in one eye. Pupil sizes were exaggerated for Experiment 1 and followed values from the literature for Experiment 2. The first Purkinje image from the eye photos in Experiment 2 was kept to preserve image realism. The characteristics measured were sex, age, attractiveness, trustworthiness, intelligence, valence, and arousal. Participants completed one of two online experiments and rated eight eye pictures with differently sized pupils and with vergence eyes. Both experiments were identical except for the stimuli designs. Results from Experiment 1 revealed rating differences between pupil sizes for all characteristics except sex, age, and arousal. Specifically, eyes with extremely small pupil sizes and artificial vergence received the lowest ratings compared to medium and large pupil sizes. Results from Experiment 2 only indicated weak effects of pupil size and vergence, particularly for intelligence ratings. We conclude that the pupils can influence how characteristics of another person are perceived and may be regarded as important social signals in subconscious social interaction processes. However, the effects may be rather small for neutral expressions.