News Release

Married couples in supportive relationships felt significantly less stressed while watching horror movie clips with their partner than without, as measured by pupil dilation

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

Married couples in supportive relationships felt significantly less stressed while watching horror movie clips with their partner than without, as measured by pupil dilation

image: Image Captions: a: Tonic pupil size as a function of video condition, spouse condition, and relationship quality. Note. Graph shows pupil size in millimeters across all video clips from videos’ onset to videos’ end. The lines depict the average linear change for all participants and for all video clips as reported in Table 4. Circles and triangles represent the raw data in 100ms bins. b: Average tonic pupil change by condition: Three-way interaction. Note. This graph depicts the amount of increase in pupil size by condition when viewing the horror videos compared to pupil size during neutral videos. Having a supportive marital relationship while concurrently having one’s spouse hold their hand resulted in less pupil dilation during horror videos. Graph depicts the same data as Fig 2a but modeled as change scores to represent more clearly this statistically significant three-way interaction. view more 

Credit: Graff et al, 2021, PLOS ONE (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Married couples in supportive relationships felt significantly less stressed while watching horror movie clips with their partner than without, as measured by pupil dilation.

###

Article Title: Spousal emotional support and relationship quality buffers pupillary response to horror movies

Author Countries: United States of America

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.


Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0256823
 


Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.