6 161 Eyes on you: ensuring empathic accuracy or signaling empathy? irritated they felt after each video. All questions were rated on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much). Stimulus presentation and simultaneous eye movement recordings were conducted using E-Prime 2.0 software with the E-Prime Extension for Tobii package (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA, United States). The screen resolution was 1920x1080 pixels and videos were presented on the screen in 960x540 pixels. Eye tracking Eye movements were recorded with a portable Tobii Pro X3-120 eye tracker sampling at 120 Hz. Prior to the start of the task perceivers were asked to place their head in a chin rest to prevent head movement during the recording and the distance to the screen was set at 60 cm. Perceivers’ eyes were calibrated using a 9-point calibration grid and calibration results were visually inspected and accepted if quality was approved. In case of missing calibration points or poor calibration quality, the procedure was repeated for a maximum of three attempts after which the quality was unlikely to further improve. The EA task started directly after the calibration procedure and gaze data was recorded until the task was finished. Trait empathy To assess trait empathy perceivers filled out the empathic concern (EC) and perspective taking (PT) subscales of the interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) prior to the start of the lab visit (Davis, 1980; De Corte et al., 2007). EC includes the reported tendency to experience feelings of sympathy and compassion for unfortunate others and PT includes the reported tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others in everyday life. Both subscales include 7 items and are answered on a Likert scale ranging from 0 (does not describe me well) to 4 (describes me very well). Sum scores of each subscale were calculated by adding up the items (range in the present sample was 7–28 for EC and 6–27 for PT). Higher scores represent higher trait empathy levels. The validity and reliability of the Dutch IRI have been established (De Corte et al., 2007) and the internal consistencies of the subscales in the present sample were acceptable (α = 0.75 for both). Intellectual functioning Intellectual functioning was assessed with two subtests of the Dutch Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV (WAIS-IV-NL; Wechsler (2012)): Block design (perceptual organization skills) and vocabulary (verbal skills). Individual raw scores were translated into norm scores based on age and were averaged to calculate the estimated intellectual functioning measure per individual. This measure was included as covariate in the analyses to control for individual differences in intellectual functioning. Validity of this subtest dyad with the original full scale IQ has been established (Girard et al., 2015).
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