How Our Gaze Reacts to Another Person’s Tears? Experimental Insights Into Eye Tracking Technology

Abstract

Crying is an ubiquitous human behavior through which an emotion is expressed on the face together with visible tears and constitutes a slippery riddle for researchers. To provide an answer to the question “How our gaze reacts to another person’s tears?,” we made use of eye tracking technology to study a series of visual stimuli. By presenting an illustrative example through an experimental setting specifically designed to study the “tearing effect,” the present work aims to offer methodological insight on how to use eye-tracking technology to study non-verbal cues. A sample of 30 healthy young women with normal visual acuity performed a within-subjects task in which they evaluated images of real faces with and without tears while their eye movements were tracked. Tears were found to be a magnet for visual attention in the task of facial attribution, facilitating a greater perception of emotional intensity. Moreover, the inspection pattern changed qualitatively and quantitatively, with our participants becoming fully focused on the tears when they were visible. The mere presence of a single tear running down a cheek was associated with an increased emotional inference and greater perception of sincerity. Using normalized and validated tools (Reading the Eyes in the Mind Test and the SALAMANCA screening test for personality disorders), we measured the influence of certain characteristics of the participants on their performance of the experimental task. On the one hand, a higher level of cognitive empathy helped to classify tearful faces with higher emotional intensity and tearless faces with less emotional intensity. On the other hand, we observed that less sincerity was attributed to the tearful faces as the SALAMANCA test scores rose in clusters A (strange and extravagant) and B (immature and emotionally unstable) of our sample. The present findings highlight the advantages of using eye tracking technology to study non-verbal cues and draw attention to methodological issues that should be taken into account. Further exploration of the relationship between empathy and tear perception could be a fruitful avenue of future research using eye tracking.

When animals cry: The effect of adding tears to animal expressions on human judgment

“…anger; surprise; happiness; fear; disgust; sadness) if they thought the animal was expressing such, or to indicate that the animal’s expression was emotionally “neutral” if they felt that was the case. We then applied a dichotomous classification based on previous works: emotion, if any, versus emotionless [ 11 , 16 ]. “Emotionless” indicated faces with no perceived expression.…”

“…There is much scientific evidence to show that humans are extraordinarily apt at detecting micro-nuances that alter their emotional perception when judging another human’s face, and our reaction to emotional tears is the perfect example [ 9 ]. Tears running down a cheek are capable of changing our bioelectric brain activity [ 10 ], and even alter the typical visual inspection pattern in such a way that tears act as magnets of attention [ 11 ].…”

Emotional tears as social motivators: When and how tearing up motivates social support

“…There is evidence that tearful individuals are perceived as more honest (Brooks, 2011;, sincere (Gračanin et al, 2021;Picó, Espert, et al, 2020), and reliable (Picó, Gračanin, et al, 2020). Picó, Espert, et al (2020) and Picó, Gračanin, et al (2020) exposed participants to photographs of tearful (vs. non-tearful) people paired with information on specific transgressions and found that the tearful individuals were rated as kinder, more reliable, and more remorseful. Similarly, Hornsey et al (2020) found that when public apologies were accompanied by tears (vs. no tears), they were perceived as more sincere, and the transgressors were considered more remorseful.…”

“…Morality. There is evidence that tearful individuals are perceived as more honest (Brooks, 2011; Zickfeld et al., 2021), sincere (Gračanin et al., 2021; Picó, Espert, et al., 2020), and reliable (Picó, Gračanin, et al., 2020). Picó, Espert, et al.…”

Empathic gaze: a study of human resource professionals

“…In humans, emotions are automatically transmitted through visual cues, including non-verbal behaviours such as facial expressions and body language (Picó, 2020). While gazing is unique amongst non-verbal behaviours in that the eye is a sensory organ often associated with the gathering of information, at the same time, it performs the function of sending signals to others.…”