Decoding the Silent Language of the Eyes: Occluding the Eye Region Impacts Understanding and Sharing of Emotions With Others

Abstract

Emotional expressions can be recognized from the eye region alone. However, it remains unknown how reading emotions from the eyes impacts downstream abilities that build on basic emotion recognition, including understanding (i.e., affective theory of mind) and sharing of emotions (i.e., affective empathy). In three experiments we investigated how occluding the eye region of emotional faces impacted judgments of affective theory of mind and affective empathy. Participants viewed emotional faces with eye regions covered by opaque occluders, transparent occluders, or no occluders. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants reported the protagonists’ emotional valence and intensity. In Experiment 3, participants rated their own empathy and emotional valence for the protagonist. When eyes were occluded, protagonists were judged to feel more neutral and less intense emotion and were empathized with less. This provides one of the first direct links between eye region information and the complex socioemotional processes of inferring and sharing emotions.

Glimpses into the social mind: Decoding messages from faces and eyes.

“…Studies have implicated different face parts as carrying differential diagnostic values for the recognition of different emotions (e.g., Bombari et al, 2013). For example, recognition of fearful, sad, and angry expressions has been found to rely strongly on the visual information from the eyes (Barrett, 2018; Kret & de Gelder, 2012; McCrackin, Provencher, et al, 2023). Recognition of happy and disgusted expressions has been found to rely strongly on the visual information from the mouth and nose while surprised expressions appear to be equally reliant on visual information from both lower and upper face parts (Blais et al, 2012; Peterson & Eckstein, 2012; Smith et al, 2005).…”

“…In the studies that followed (McCrackin et al, 2022; McCrackin, Provencher, et al, 2023), we investigated how visual occlusion of a face affected downstream complex socioemotional processes that require accurate perception of emotions from faces. We focused on affective theory of mind, which is implicated in understanding of emotions in others, and affective empathy, which is implicated in sharing of emotions with others.…”

“…We examined how the affective theory of mind and affective empathy were affected by visual occlusion of the lower (McCrackin et al, 2022) and upper face parts (McCrackin, Provencher, et al, 2023). Figure 1 shows examples of stimuli used in these studies.…”