title: Motivated empathy: the mechanics of the empathic gaze.
abstract: 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).
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology , University of Queensland , Brisbane , QLD , Australia.
authors.forename: David G
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Cowan
authors.forename: Eric J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Vanman
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nielsen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D004645:Empathy / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Emotion; Empathy; Eye-gaze patterns; Eye-tracking; Social interaction