Summary: New research suggests that a person’s pupil dilation in response to emotional cues may help identify who is most likely to develop depression after a natural disaster.
Source: Binghamton University
Pupil dilation may help identify people at greater risk of depression after disaster-related stress, pointing toward more targeted post-disaster interventions, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Researchers at Binghamton University enrolled 51 women who lived in the greater Binghamton, New York area during the 2011 catastrophic flood. Each participant had reported a life event indicating that she or her child had been affected by the flood to some degree. To be eligible for the study, women either had a lifetime history of major depressive disorder or had no lifetime diagnosis of any DSM-IV mood disorder. The team then measured pupillary responses to emotional facial expressions and tracked depressive symptoms following the flood.
The study found that smaller pupil dilation to emotional facial expressions predicted a significant increase in depressive symptoms after the flood, but only for women who also experienced higher levels of flood-related stress. In other words, reduced pupillary response alone did not predict later depression; the risk emerged when that physiological marker interacted with substantial life stress from the disaster.
Mary Woody, a graduate student at Binghamton and lead author of the study, explained the rationale: “One of the theories of depression is that many vulnerabilities lie dormant until stress activates them. The flood represents a large, objective stressor that affected the community unevenly. We wanted to see whether a vulnerability marker—pupil response—could predict which families would experience the most depression after the flood when combined with differing levels of disaster-related stress.”
Co-author Brandon Gibb, professor of psychology, director of the Mood Disorders Institute and Center for Affective Science at Binghamton University, noted the clinical implications: “In light of the current findings, it is certainly plausible that individuals displaying decreased pupillary response to emotional stimuli and relatively higher levels of disaster-related stress may be good candidates for cognitive therapy to alleviate their depression.”
This is the first study to prospectively examine how pupillary response to emotional stimuli interacts with life stress to predict later depression. The results suggest that measuring cognitive-affective responding—here indexed by pupillary reactivity—could improve our understanding of how stress leads to depression and assist clinicians in identifying people most likely to need care after a natural disaster.
The researchers emphasize the practical value of such risk markers. Following natural disasters, only a subset of the affected population develops major depression—estimates suggest roughly 20–25 percent may do so. Given limited mental health resources after large-scale events, identifying who is at greatest risk could enable more efficient allocation of interventions, focusing clinical resources on those most likely to benefit.
The authors propose that interventions designed to strengthen cognitive-affective processing—such as cognitive therapy or other evidence-based treatments that improve emotional processing and regulation—may be particularly useful for individuals who show reduced pupillary response and who experience higher disaster-related stress. If future studies replicate and extend these findings, pupillary measures could become part of screening protocols to guide targeted prevention and early intervention efforts after floods, storms, or other disasters.
Source: Mary Woody – Binghamton University
Image credit: National Weather Service
Original research: “Pupillary response to emotional stimuli as a risk factor for depressive symptoms following a natural disaster: The 2011 Binghamton flood,” to be published in Clinical Psychological Science.
Abstract
Cultural Differences in Visual Search for Geometric Figures
Research on cultural differences in visual processing has produced mixed results, perhaps because many tasks are complex and engage high-level cognitive processes that can mask basic perceptual differences. To address this, researchers examined a relatively simple visual search task—finding geometric figures among distractors—where underlying mechanisms are better understood. Consistent with prior work, North American participants exhibited a reliable search asymmetry for line length: they located a long line among short lines faster than they found a short line among long ones. Japanese participants, however, showed no such asymmetry. This difference did not depend on stimulus density, and other stimulus types produced different asymmetry patterns, indicating that the observed cultural differences are unlikely to stem from broad analytic-versus-holistic processing differences. Instead, the findings suggest culture-related variations in early-level feature processing that may be shaped by environmental factors. These results point to specific perceptual mechanisms through which culture can influence visual cognition.
“Cultural Differences in Visual Search for Geometric Figures” by Yoshiyuki Ueda, Lei Chen, Jonathon Kopecky, Emily S. Cramer, Ronald A. Rensink, David E. Meyer, Shinobu Kitayama, and Jun Saiki. Published in Cognitive Science (online March 25, 2017).