Affect in the eyes: explicit and implicit evaluations

Abstract

The present study investigated whether another individual's gaze direction influences an observer's affective responses. In Experiment 1, subjective self-ratings and an affective priming paradigm were employed to examine how participants explicitly and implicitly, respectively, evaluated the affective valence of direct gaze, averted gaze, and closed eyes. The explicit self-ratings showed that participants evaluated closed eyes more positively than direct gaze. However, the implicit priming task showed an inverse pattern of results indicating that direct gaze was automatically evaluated more positively than closed eyes were. Experiment 2 confirmed that the opposite patterns of results between the two tasks were not due to differences in presentation times of the gaze stimuli. The results provide evidence for automatic affective reactions to eye gaze and indicate a dissociation between explicit and implicit affective evaluations of eyes and gaze direction.

Affective Eye Contact: An Integrative Review

“…Thus, unlike in the study by Lawson (2015), in this study, participants’ attention was not directed to the gaze direction, and concepts related to the stimulus face’s focus of attention were not activated. The results by Chen et al (2017a) showed that the response (categorization) times for positive words were significantly shorter when they were presented after direct-gaze rather than closed-eyes primes, whereas the response times to negative words were significantly shorter when they were presented after closed-eyes rather than direct-gaze primes. For both targets, the response times after averted-gaze primes were numerically between those observed after direct-gaze and closed-eyes primes, but these response times did not differ statistically significantly from those.…”

“…Thus, Chen et al (2017a) interpreted their results to indicate that seeing a direct gaze automatically activated more positive evaluations than did seeing closed eyes. Interestingly, Chen and colleagues also measured explicit affective feelings evoked by the stimuli.…”

“…Faces with static direct gaze have been shown to elicit more pleasant subjective feeling states (i.e., higher ratings of subjective affective valence) as compared to faces with averted gaze, both when pictures of real human faces (Uono and Hietanen, 2015) or pictures showing the eye-region of animated realistic looking faces (Experiment 2, Chen et al, 2017a) were used as stimuli. However, it should be noted that the study by Chen and colleagues also included eye-region stimuli with closed eyes.…”

“…On attempting to identify a pattern behind the studies and their results described above, one would be tempted to argue that the more the stimuli resembled the gaze during natural interaction, the less likely direct gaze was to evoke relatively more positive affective feelings as compared to averted gaze. Studies in which participants were presented still images of faces or eye-regions (Uono and Hietanen, 2015; Chen et al, 2017a) reported higher valence ratings to direct versus averted gaze. A study that presented stimuli with dynamic gaze aversions resulted in no effect of gaze direction (Marschner et al, 2015).…”

“…Chen et al (2017a) employed the affective priming paradigm to investigate the automatic affective evaluations elicited by gaze stimuli. In this study, direct-gaze, averted-gaze, and closed-eyes stimuli (eye-region “letterbox” stimuli) were briefly presented (masked 13-ms and unmasked 100-ms presentation times) as primes, followed by positive and negative words as targets (with prime-target onset delays of 150 ms and 300 ms).…”