Eye Contact Judgment Is Influenced by Perceivers’ Social Anxiety But Not by Their Affective State
نویسندگان
چکیده
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.
منابع مشابه
What You Feel Influences What You See: The Role of Affective Feelings in Resolving Binocular Rivalry.
It seems obvious that what you see influences what you feel, but what if the opposite were also true? What if how you feel can shape your visual experience? In this experiment, we demonstrate that the affective state of a perceiver influences the contents of visual awareness. Participants received positive, negative, and neutral affect inductions and then completed a series of binocular rivalry...
متن کاملStructural Modeling of Relationship Between Disease Stigma and Social Anxiety by Considering the Mediating Role of Family Function in Patients With Epilepsy
Background and Objective: Epilepsy is one of the most common and chronic neurological diseases that can cause many psychological problems for people with this disease. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between disease stigma and social anxiety considering the mediating role of family function in patients with epilepsy. Methods: The study design was descriptive-corre...
متن کاملNeural and Behavioral Evidence for Affective Priming from Unconsciously Perceived Emotional Facial Expressions and the Influence of Trait Anxiety
Abstract Affective judgments can often be influenced by emotional information people unconsciously perceive, but the neural mechanisms responsible for these effects and how they are modulated by individual differences in sensitivity to threat are unclear. Here we studied subliminal affective priming by recording brain potentials to surprise faces preceded by 30-msec happy or fearful prime faces...
متن کاملThe Interpersonal Nature of Empathic Accuracy
Although current theories suggest that affective empathy (perceivers’ experience of social targets’ emotions) should contribute to empathic accuracy (perceivers’ ability to accurately assess targets’ emotions), extant research has failed to consistently demonstrate a correspondence between them. We reasoned that prior null findings may be attributable to a failure to account for the fundamental...
متن کاملMoral Judgments and Visual Attention: An Eye- Tracking Investigation
When making moral judgments people often make snap decisions and then highlight information that confirms that preliminary judgment, a phenomenon referred to as “motivated moral reasoning.” The current study uses eye-tracking technology to examine whether people are also “motivated moral perceivers” – that is, whether people disproportionally attend to visual information that is consistent with...
متن کامل