168 Chapter 6 related to perceivers’ EA, nor did it moderate the relation between gazing to the eyes of others and perceivers’ EA. In contrast to our hypotheses we found that perceivers who gazed more towards the eye regions of targets were not more empathically accurate. Moreover, perceivers who gazed less towards the eyes of others during positive videos were even more empathically accurate. Although the importance of the eye region has consistently been demonstrated in studies that solely convey visual input, our findings indicate that the eye region seems to be less informative when visual input is presented in co-occurrence with verbal information. While prior studies have greatly contributed to our basic understanding of the role of the eye region in social interactions, the current results emphasize the importance of also studying such processes in more ecologically valid settings since conclusions can deviate in important ways. Our results did not show an effect of target expressivity on perceivers’ EA scores, nor did it moderate the relation between gazing to the eyes of targets and perceivers’ EA. This was not in line with our hypotheses and prior studies using the Dutch EA task, but this might be due to differences in methodology. In the current, shortened, version of the EA task we included six out of 11 targets, which considerably decreased the diversity of target expressivity in the present study. In addition, the BEQ mainly focuses on emotional expressivity in the face of targets, while perceivers also receive verbally expressive informational cues of the targets to base their EA on. It is possible that targets who report to have less expressive faces could still have an expressive tone of voice, which might have revealed information about their internal state. An unexpected finding was that perceivers who considered themselves more empathic, both at trait (EC and PT scales of the IRI) and state level (individual ratings after each video), gazed more towards the eye region of others. In this light, gazing to others’ eyes might be a way to express empathy to others, rather than (only) collect (additional) socio-emotional information about others’ internal state. This dovetails with the results of Cowan et al. (2014) and MartínezVelázquez et al. (2020), who interpreted the increased gazing towards the eye region of others as enhanced social engagement. Moreover, looking at the eyes of a conversational partner while listening was found to signal interest and affiliation (Breil & Böckler, 2021). We found that perceivers gazed more towards the eye region of others during negative versus positive videos. In addition, individual ratings of perceivers’ state empathy showed that they were better able to empathize with and take the perspective of targets in negative versus positive videos. This is in accordance with the possible signaling function of eye gaze, suggesting that people might have a natural tendency to empathize with and gaze more to the eyes of others during negative versus positive emotional situations. This effect may have been emphasized by the stimuli duration (±1 – 2 minutes), as empathic feelings are particularly induced after
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