Effects of Direct and Averted Gaze on the Perception of Facially Communicated Emotion.

Adams, Reginald B.; Kleck, Robert E.

doi:10.1037/1528-3542.5.1.3

Cited by 553 publications

(548 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…In experiment 2, fearful eyes with direct gaze evoked a larger Nc than fearful eyes with averted gaze, which is in contrast to adult models of fear detection that show greater sensitivity to fearful faces in the context of averted gaze (25,26). This increased neural sensitivity to eyes showing direct gaze might be explained by the fact that especially during infancy, direct gaze (eye contact) serves as such a powerful signal in directing attention and learning (eye contact effect, ref.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 48%

“…Critically, eye gaze and emotion perception have been shown to powerfully interact. For example, fearful eyes elicit stronger behavioral and neural responses when averted from than when directed at an observer (25,26). This presumably relates to the fact that averted fearful eyes inform an observer about a potential danger in the environment (clear threat), whereas directed fearful eyes signal fear of the observer (ambiguous threat).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants

Jessen

Großmann

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Human eyes serve two key functions in face-to-face social interactions: they provide cues about a person's emotional state and attentional focus (gaze direction). Both functions critically rely on the morphologically unique human sclera and have been shown to operate even in the absence of conscious awareness in adults. However, it is not known whether the ability to respond to social cues from scleral information without conscious awareness exists early in human ontogeny and can therefore be considered a foundational feature of human social functioning. In the current study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to show that 7-mo-old infants discriminate between fearful and nonfearful eyes (experiment 1) and between direct and averted gaze (experiment 2), even when presented below the perceptual threshold. These effects were specific to the human sclera and not seen in response to polarityinverted eyes. Our results suggest that early in ontogeny the human brain detects social cues from scleral information even in the absence of conscious awareness. The current findings support the view that the human eye with its prominent sclera serves critical communicative functions during human social interactions.infancy | social perception | human eye | subliminal processing | emotion processing

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 48%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants

Jessen

Großmann

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Similarly, main effects of gaze direction must be also be interpreted carefully because gaze is the attended dimension in some cases and to be ignored in others. Although our studies cannot resolve the nature of gaze and expression interactions, like the studies of Adams and Kleck (2005), they do imply that the emotional discriminability or ambiguity of facial expressions could be a critical factor in whether the two dimensions interact. The results of our study suggest that the role of stimulus ambiguity in gaze and expression interactions may be a potentially fruitful line of future inquiry.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…Adams and Kleck (2005) used both pure and morphed facial expressions of fear and anger to assess gaze and expression interactions. Although they did not use happy and sad facial expressions as in Experiment 2 of the present study, they did intermix several different identities in their design.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Garner interference reveals dependencies between emotional expression and gaze in face perception.

Graham¹,

LaBar²

2007

Emotion

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The relationship between facial expression and gaze processing was investigated with the Garner selective attention paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants performed expression judgments without interference from gaze, but expression interfered with gaze judgments. Experiment 2 replicated these results across different emotions. In both experiments, expression judgments occurred faster than gaze judgments, suggesting that expression was processed before gaze could interfere. In Experiments 3 and 4, the difficulty of the emotion discrimination was increased in two different ways. In both cases, gaze interfered with emotion judgments and vice versa. Furthermore, increasing the difficulty of the emotion discrimination resulted in gaze and expression interactions. Results indicate that expression and gaze interactions are modulated by discriminability. Whereas expression generally interferes with gaze judgments, gaze direction modulates expression processing only when facial emotion is difficult to discriminate.

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“…Subjects more readily perceive so-called approach-oriented emotions (joy and anger) when the target's gaze is directed at them -i.e., when the subject is not just an onlooker, but also someone looked at -than when it is averted. However, the perception of socalled avoidance-related emotions (fear and sadness) seems enhanced if the target's gaze is averted (Adams & Kleck, 2005). Again, then, there seems little room for an interactionist proposal that is neither implausible nor fully compatible with existing proposals.…”

Section: Interaction As Enabling Mindreadingmentioning

confidence: 86%