Pupil response as a measure of dysfunctional emotional processing
Research type
Research Study
Full title
In the eyes of the beholder - pupil response as a measure of emotional processing in a personality disordered population.
IRAS ID
154041
Contact name
Robert Snowden
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Cardiff University
Research summary
The aim of the study is to evaluate whether individuals diagnosed with either a psychopathic or borderline personality disorder (PD) show emotional processing deficits through the measurement of pupil response. Emotional processing deficits are central to the symptoms and distress of PDs with Psychopathic and Borderline PD thought to represent the extremes of emotional processing (hypo-responsivity in psychopathic PD and hyper-responsivity in borderline PD), but self-report measures of emotional processing have proven to be unreliable in both populations and other methods (e.g. measuring sweat response or brain imaging) are intrusive, cumbersome and expensive. Pupil response offers a fast and unobtrusive measure of automatic emotional processing; we want to take advantage of this novel paradigm to evaluate the emotional processing of individuals with a PD. The paradigm will involve showing participants a variety of emotional images and video-clips as well as playing audio sound-clips, whilst measuring pupil response , as well as assessing personality traits using several self-report questionnaires. The pupil response patterns of our two clinical groups will be compared against a control group matched for gender, age and IQ to see whether Psychopathic PD is related to physiological under-responsivity and Borderline PD is linked to over-responsivity as expected.
REC name
South Central - Berkshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/SC/1198
Date of REC Opinion
8 Aug 2014
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion