170 Chapter 6 Conclusion While prior studies have shown the importance of the eye region for inferring others’ feelings when only visual information is available, our results show that gazing to the eyes of others may not contribute to EA when both visual and verbal information is available. In addition, gazing to the eyes of others seem to be a way to express empathy and social engagement to others. In other words, our results inform us on the role of eye gazing during social interactions and shed light on a possible signaling function of eye gazing to sympathize or empathize with our conversational partners. This outcome, compared to that obtained using less ecologically valid paradigms, emphasizes the importance of studying how individuals perceive others in social settings that closely mimic real life. Our findings enrich the field of social sciences in several ways and implicate that we need to be very careful in translating findings from basic science to the complex realm of daily life. On a theoretical level, there is a clear need to better understand the factors that contribute to EA in daily life, as our data seem to suggest that gazing to the eyes is not a substantial source of information in our daily conversations. At the methodological level, these results make us aware of the way methodological differences between studies give rise to diverging outcomes and that a combination of both basic experiments and designs including more ecologically valid measures is needed to better understand social interactions. Lastly, our findings may have implications at the practical level for communication between people in general, and might be of particular relevance for health care practitioners in medical or therapeutic settings. Signaling their empathy and emotional engagement by gazing into the eyes of their clients, especially when listening to their (emotionally valenced) personal stories, might be particularly helpful in favoring the quality of the therapeutic relationship.
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