Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Cowan, David G.
• Vanman, Eric J.
• Nielsen, Mark

Titel

Motivated empathy: The mechanics of the empathic gaze

Ist Teil von

• Cognition and emotion, 2014-01, Vol.28 (8), p.1522-1530

Ort / Verlag

Hove: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Successful human social interactions frequently rely on appropriate interpersonal empathy and eye contact. Here, we report a previously unseen relationship between trait empathy and eye-gaze patterns to affective facial features in video-based stimuli. Fifty-nine healthy adult participants had their eyes tracked while watching a three-minute long "sad" and "emotionally neutral" video. The video stimuli portrayed the head and shoulders of the same actor recounting a fictional personal event. Analyses revealed that the greater participants' trait emotional empathy, the more they fixated on the eye-region of the actor, regardless of the emotional valence of the video stimuli. Our findings provide the first empirical evidence of a relationship between empathic capacity and eye-gaze pattern to the most affective facial region (eyes).