Eye Contact Judgment Is Influenced by Perceivers' Social Anxiety But Not by Their Affective State.

Tingji Chen,Lauri Nummenmaa,Jari K Hietanen

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00373

Tingji Chen, Lauri Nummenmaa + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00373

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Abstract

Fast and accurate judgment of whether another person is making eye contact or not is crucial for our social interaction. As affective states have been shown to influence social perceptions and judgments, we investigated the influence of observers’ own affective states and trait anxiety on their eye contact judgments. In two experiments, participants were required to judge whether animated faces (Experiment 1) and real faces (Experiment 2) with varying gaze angles were looking at them or not. Participants performed the task in pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant odor conditions. The results from two experiments showed that eye contact judgments were not modulated by observers’ affective state, yet participants with higher levels of social anxiety accepted a wider range of gaze deviations from the direct gaze as eye contact. We conclude that gaze direction judgments depend on individual differences in affective predispositions, yet they are not amenable to situational affective influences.

Highlights

Fast and accurate discrimination of where another person is looking at, especially the judgment of whether another individual is making eye contact or not, is an important skill supporting social interaction
The analysis of variance (ANOVA) on gaze cone width showed that the main effect of odor condition was not significant, F(2,36) = 0.76, p = 0.473, η2p = 0.041, and there was no main effect of gaze direction (p = 0.339) or interaction between odor condition and gaze direction (p = 0.281) either
There was no main effect of odor condition or gaze direction (p = 0.754 and p = 0.284, respectively) or interactions involving odor condition, gaze angle, and gaze direction (p = 0.551, p = 0.640, p = 0.689, and p = 0.611)

Summary

Introduction

Fast and accurate discrimination of where another person is looking at, especially the judgment of whether another individual is making eye contact or not, is an important skill supporting social interaction. Negative emotional state facilitates recognition of negative facial expressions and positive emotional state facilitates recognition of positive facial expressions (Schiffenbauer, 1974; Terwot et al, 1991; Bouhuys et al, 1995; Niedenthal et al, 2000; Leppänen and Hietanen, 2003; Forgas and East, 2008; Zhou and Chen, 2009; Schmid and Mast, 2010). These findings indicate that recognition of facial expressions is facilitated by affectively congruent contexts and perceivers’ emotions

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