## 2 Methods
### Procedure and Task  
Participants wore a head-mounted eye-tracker and were asked to conduct an adapted clinical interview with another person and to additionally ask about the interviewee's experiences with health issues in her family. The interview was conducted via an online video-call using BigBlueButton (2021). Participants were told to read and ask 67 questions (see Supplementary Tables S1-S5) in sequence and wait until the interviewee had responded to each question before asking the next question. Unbeknownst to the participants, the person to whom they were interviewing (i.e., the interviewee) was a trained confederate of the experimenters, who had been informed about the study's aim beforehand. The confederate answered the questions of the participant in afixed, prescribed manner, either in an on average more negative (e.g., \"My mother died after she was diagnosed with corona\") or a more neutral (e.g., \"My mother was quarantined after she was diagnosed with corona\") manner. In addition, the confederate also used pre-specified and practiced emotional facial expressions and gestures (e.g., from and/or lower her gaze) during her responses. Out of the 67 questions, 7 were pre-experimental information questions and another 11 were used as baseline questions. The interviewee's answers to these pre-experimental and baseline questions were the same, regardless of which emotional content group participants were assigned to (i.e., regardless of the manipulation). The participants' pupil responses to the baseline questions served as a reference for comparison with the pupil responses in the later, manipulated part of the experiment (see below), as both the content of the questions and of the answers during baseline and manipulation touched upon less socially desirable personal information about the behavior and or the experiences of the interviewee. After the baseline questions, participants were instructed to ask another 49 questions, the answers to which were manipulated and depended on the group the participants were assigned to. This part of the interview was labeled the \"manipulation\". In the neutral emotional content condition (low and high cognitive load; NEUL and NEUH), the interviewee answered the participant's questions in a neutral manner (see Supplementary Table S4). In contrast, in the negative emotional content condition (low and high cognitive load; NEGL and NEGH), the interviewee answered participants' questions in a more negative manner (see Supplementary Table S5). The difference between pupil sizes during baseline and manipulation was the conventional measure of demand-elicited pupillary changes during the manipulation, as the lighting conditions during baseline and manipulation were the same and the two phases of the experiment differed only in terms of the workload and the emotional content of the answers. The interview itself lasted between 25 and 30 min. Regarding the tasks, all participants had to remember as much of the interviewee's responses as they could, since they were tested for their memory of the interview afterward. Participants' mental or cognitive (work)load was manipulated by giving participants one or two tasks. One of these tasks was the same for all participants: Participants had to discriminate if the interviewee only referred to herself while giving an answer, or if she mentioned anybody else as well. If she only talked about herself, participants were to press the \"Y\" key on the keyboard at the end of an answer, while they were to press the \"X\" key if the interviewee mentioned someone else (\"Verbal Task\"). In addition, participants in the high-load conditions (NEUH and NEGH) were asked to discriminate the match between the interviewee's facial expressions and the content of her verbal responses.