6 167 Eyes on you: ensuring empathic accuracy or signaling empathy? Figure 6.2 Associations between the percentage of dwell time within the eye region of targets and perceivers’ EA in positive and negative videos. Significant p-values <.05 were indicated by *, p <.01 by **, and p <.001 by ***. Explorative analyses The finding that perceivers who gazed more into the eye region of targets during positive videos were less empathically accurate raised the question whether perceivers instead gazed more to the mouth during these videos. Therefore, we additionally explored whether valence also interacted with the percentage of dwell time to the mouth of the targets. We examined the interaction between the percentage of dwell time to the mouth and emotional valence of the videos on perceivers’ EA, but this interaction was non-significant (p = .063). Also, there was no significant interaction between the percentage of dwell time to the mouth of targets and targets’ emotional expressivity on perceivers’ EA (p = .752) or between the percentage of dwell time to the mouth of targets and perceivers’ EA in general (p = .860). DISCUSSION The present study used a paradigm with high ecological validity to examine whether gazing to the eyes of others contributes to EA during videos of emotionally valenced target stories in which verbal information was also available. First, gazing to the eyes of others did not significantly contribute to EA. Second, however, the emotional valence of the stories did moderate the relation between gazing to the eyes of others and EA. Perceivers who gazed more to the eye region of others during positive target stories were less empathically accurate, whereas this was not found during negative target stories. Third, targets’ emotional expressivity was not significantly
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