158 Chapter 6 during these expressions, possibly to search for additional emotion cues (Bombari et al., 2013; Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011). As such, looking at the eye region of others might contribute more strongly to EA during negative versus positive emotional situations. Besides, the eye region might be particularly informative when facial expressions are rather subtle or ambiguous (Baron‐ Cohen et al., 1997; Vaidya et al., 2014). As facial expressions are generally less pronounced in less emotionally expressive persons, looking into the eye region of others might contribute more to EA when these “others” are less emotionally expressive. In the present study, we aimed to determine whether gazing to the eyes of others contributes to EA when verbal content is present as well. Additionally, we examined whether this was dependent on the valence of the story content and targets’ emotional expressivity. All measures and hypotheses of this study were preregistered at Open Science Framework prior to data analyses (https://osf.io/qxdv9/). We hypothesized that 1) perceivers who look more towards the eye region of targets show higher EA, 2) the amount of gaze towards the eyes of others is a stronger predictor of EA in negative versus positive videos, and 3) the amount of gaze towards the eyes of others is a stronger predictor of EA when targets are less emotionally expressive. METHOD Participants Data were collected in the context of the RE-PAIR study: “Relations and Emotions in ParentAdolescent Interaction Research”. This study examines the relation between parent-adolescent interactions and adolescent mood. Families were eligible for inclusion if the adolescent and at least one of the parents were willing to participate and had a good command of the Dutch language. Further inclusion criteria were applied to the adolescents and can be found in Supplement S6.1. There were no additional in- or exclusion criteria for the parents. The present study includes data of the parents of adolescents without psychopathology (n = 150); subsequently referred to as participants or as perceivers. Data of 43 participants were excluded: Complete task data of five participants was lost due to technical problems with the task and gaze data of 38 participants were missing due to unsuccessful calibration of the eye tracker. Reasons for the failure of calibration procedures were sight deficiencies, participants wearing glasses, or participants having light-colored eyes, which are all confirmed in prior studies to influence gaze data quality (Kammerer, 2009; Nyström et al., 2013). Of note, the EA task was embedded in a larger study for which the in- and exclusion criteria were not explicitly tailored to inclusion for eye tracking.
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