Cowan David G, Vanman Eric J, Nielsen Mark
a School of Psychology , University of Queensland , Brisbane , QLD , Australia.
Cogn Emot. 2014;28(8):1522-30. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2014.890563. Epub 2014 Feb 25.
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).
成功的人类社交互动常常依赖于恰当的人际共情和眼神交流。在此，我们报告了特质共情与基于视频的刺激中情感面部特征的注视模式之间一种前所未见的关系。59名健康成年参与者在观看一段三分钟长的“悲伤”和“情绪中性”视频时，他们的眼睛被追踪。视频刺激描绘了同一名演员讲述一个虚构个人事件时的头部和肩部。分析表明，参与者的特质情感共情越强，他们就越关注演员的眼部区域，无论视频刺激的情感效价如何。我们的研究结果首次提供了共情能力与对最具情感的面部区域（眼睛）的注视模式之间关系的实证证据。
