6 157 Eyes on you: ensuring empathic accuracy or signaling empathy? INTRODUCTION The ability to empathize with others is often considered a key ingredient for successful social interactions. However, the accuracy of inferring another’s thoughts and feelings, also referred to as empathic accuracy (EA), is at least equally important (Ickes & Hodges, 2013; Zaki et al., 2008; Zaki et al., 2009). Several studies have emphasized the importance of the eye region for inferring the internal states of others (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997; Buchan et al., 2007; Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011; Hall et al., 2010; Zaki et al., 2009). A task that emphasizes the importance of the eyes to infer the internal states of others is the reading the mind in the eyes task (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997). Numerous studies using this task have shown that a person’s eye region contains sufficient information to identify complex mental states (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997). Moreover, the eye region automatically attracts and maintains attention, especially under emotional circumstances (Cowan et al., 2014) and people are generally found to gaze more towards the eyes of others compared to other facial features (e.g., mouth, nose or cheeks) (Buchan et al., 2007; Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011; Hall et al., 2010). Notably, however, EA in real life usually entails a mixture of visual and verbal information about the social situation involved. Nonetheless, most studies into the role of eye gaze in emotion recognition made use of static pictures including only visual information. This limits the generalizability to real life social interactions. Moreover, when the specific contribution of visual and verbal information of targets to the EA of perceivers is examined, verbal information has been found to contribute more to EA than visual information, but a combination of both produces the highest EA (Zaki et al., 2009). Furthermore, static pictures of clear facial emotional expressions do not accurately capture how our emotions are expressed in daily life, which can be much more subtle and ambiguous. So, while gazing to the eye region of others is beneficial under circumstances in which the informational source is limited to visual input, the added value of eye gazing when combined with verbal information is still unclear. So far, two studies have examined the association between eye gazing and trait empathy using a similar set of dynamic stimuli with both visual and verbal content (Cowan et al., 2014; Martínez-Velázquez et al., 2020). In these studies, people gazed more toward the eyes of others in emotional versus neutral video and the amount of eye gazing was positively associated with people’s trait empathy levels. Building on these studies it is of interest to examine whether gazing toward the eyes of others also contributes to EA when visual information is presented together with verbal content. Gazing to the eyes of others may be especially helpful in situations in which social cues are ambivalent. Happy faces are quickly recognized, and eye fixations are mostly directed to the mouth region, probably because a smile on the mouth is a clear and distinctive feature of happiness (Calvo et al., 2008; Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011). Sad expressions, in contrast, generally include less distinctive facial features and people fixate more towards the eye region
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