6 163 Eyes on you: ensuring empathic accuracy or signaling empathy? First, we ran correlations between all predictor variables (i.e., percentage of dwell time within the eye region, target expressivity, valence, and trait EC and PT) and the outcome variable EA. Thereafter, we tested the validity of the task by assessing the influence of target expressivity, valence, and trait EC and PT on EA using generalized linear mixed regression models. Subsequently, we tested our main hypotheses about the influence of the percentage of dwell time within the eye region of targets on EA (hypothesis 1) and whether this interacts with the valence of the videos (hypothesis 2) or target expressivity (hypothesis 3) in two separate interactions. Exploratively, we also tested a three-way interaction between the percentage of dwell time within the eye region of targets, target expressivity, and valence on EA. In case of significant interactions, we broke down the interaction into simple contrasts using Bonferronicorrected post hoc tests. To check whether results were not driven by differences in age, gender, and intellectual functioning of perceivers, we performed additional analyses in which we statistically controlled for these variables. Significance was set at p <.05 (two-tailed) and Cohen’s d effect sizes were calculated for significant effects. RESULTS Task descriptives See Table 6.1 for demographic and clinical characteristics. Data derived from individual state empathy ratings after each video revealed that perceivers empathize more with and were better able to take the perspective of the targets during negative versus positive videos (B = 0.19, SE = 0.07, t(872.39) = 2.52, p = .012, d = 0.17 and B = 0.16, SE = 0.07, t(871.99) = 2.13, p = .033, d = 0.14, respectively). In addition, they felt significantly more sad after negative videos (B = 1.40, SE = 0.07, t(874.21) = 18.89, p <.001, d = 1.28) and happier (B = 1.65, SE = 0.07, t(870.35) = 22.13, p <.001, d = 1.50) and relaxed (B = 0.45, SE = 0.06, t(870.75) = 7.17, p <.001, d = 0.49) after positive videos. There was no significant difference in irritability between positive and negative videos (p = .366; Figure 6.1). In addition, perceivers who reported higher trait EC and PT were also better able to empathize with (B = 0.05, SE = 0.02, t(101.98) = 2.86, p = .005, d = 0.57) and take the perspective of targets (B = 0.06, SE = 0.02, t(105.03) = 3.05, p = .003, d = 0.60) based on the state empathy ratings per perceiver after each video (see Supplement S6.4 and S6.5).
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