The influence of emotional salience on gaze behavior in low and high trait empathy: an exploratory eye-tracking study

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have shown that situational factors like emotional salience are associated with higher subjective levels of state empathy. The present eye-tracking study explored whether gaze behavior varies as a function of emotional salience between individuals with low and high self-reported trait empathy. In a between-subjects design, we presented three social scene images in the context of different emotion conditions (Scene 1: neutral versus positive; Scene 2: neutral versus negative; Scene 3: positive versus negative) and assessed the dwell times of individuals with low versus high self-reported empathy (measured with the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire; TEQ). Analyses revealed that whereas low- and high-TEQ participants differed in their gaze behavior after receiving neutral information, they did not differ after receiving positive or negative information. Our preliminary results suggest that gaze behavior may be more indicative of self-reported trait empathy in situations with low emotional salience than in situations with high emotional salience.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• eye-tracking
• emotional salience
• attention
• motivation

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/VMCTE.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/VMCTE.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

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

Notes on contributors

Emine Nebi

Emine Nebi is a PhD researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her research interests include social cognition, empathy, and empathic processing, and visual information processing.

Tobias Altmann

Tobias Altmann is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research interests include psychological assessment, empathy and empathic communication, and self-esteem and self-esteem measurement.

Marcus Roth

Marcus Roth is a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research interests include empathy and empathic communication, typological approaches to personality psychology, and psychometric personality assessment.