A differentiated look at emotions: association between gaze behaviour during the processing of affective videos and emotional granularity

ABSTRACT

The ability to distinguish between subtle differences among emotions of similar valence is labelled emotion differentiation (ED). Previous research has demonstrated that people high in ED are less likely to use disengagement regulation strategies (i.e. avoidance/distraction) during negative affective states.

The present eye-tracking study examined associations between ED and visual attention/avoidance of affective stimuli. A total of 160 participants viewed emotional video clips (positive/ negative), which were concurrently presented with a non-affective distractor image. After each video, participants verbally described their experienced emotions with adjectives in an open-response format. Moreover, they completed an ED questionnaire.

The computed ED specificity index for the negative videos (the number of specific adjectives divided by all adjectives used) was positively associated with the scores on the ED questionnaire and visual revisits for the negative videos (how many times the participants gazed back and forth between video and distractor). This viewing style might reflect more active exploratory behaviour directed toward acquiring information about the negative stimulus and its context. The ED measures were not associated with the gaze behaviour for positive videos.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion differentiation
• emotional granularity
• visual attention
• eye-tracking

Data availability statement

Data are available at the Open Science Framework: (OSF; https://osf.io/ra7ku/)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Objects such as office supplies are commonly used as neutral distractors in eye-tracking studies Quigley et al. (2012). Rather simple distractors were chosen to avoid a high perceptual load which could have decreased the ability of affective stimuli to capture attention (Yates et al. 2010).

2 Each participant viewed the same 12 actors. Each actor gave positive feedback to one half of the participants and negative feedback to the other half of participants. In all paradigms, each actor was shown just once (compare: Wiggert et al., 2015).

3 Multilevel model analyses are a deviation from the preregistration. However, Pearson correlations are documented in the supplementary material.

4 Even though valence was not associated with ED specificity in the present study (see Supplementary Table 2), ED and valence are strongly overlapping concepts (Dejonckheere et al., 2019). Therefore, we calculated the multiple linear regression to predict negative ED specificity with valence as a third predictor. This model remained significant [F(3,152) = 4.16, p = .007]. However, valence was no significant predictor (p = .57).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.