Couples Felt Less Stress While Watching Horror Movie Clips

Pupillometry can capture the effects of marital stress on the body’s nervous system in real time. It also records hundreds of readings per second, providing precision and sensitivity. This experiment was aimed to replicate pupillometry stress buffering results and extend the previous findings by including a generalizable, real-life stressor—viewing a horror movie—and multidimensional relationship quality effects.

Eighty-three couples (166 participants) were quasi-grouped in this study, based on a self-reported multidimensional relationship quality scale, to either supportive or ambivalent marital relationship conditions.

They were then randomized to either spousal support (i.e., handholding) or non-support (spousal absence) condition and watched clips from both horror and nature movies while pupil dilation was measured.

Results shown that the horror video clips elicited a stress response and there were significant differences between the support and non-support conditions, as well as marital relationship quality conditions.

These results suggest the precision, speed, and sensitivity of pupillometry as a potentially fruitful method to investigate the causal mechanisms linking stress buffering and supportive marital relationships

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Source-Medindia