Things are looking up: Vertical eye gaze in the environment affects perceptions of emotional valence in sad faces

Abstract

Successful social interactions depend on the ability to quickly evaluate emotional facial expressions. Research has shown that head orientation and eye gaze are informative affective signals. Across four experiments, we explored a novel eye gaze cue grounded in a consideration of English spatial metaphors, where up connotes positive feelings (“I’m flying high”) and down connotes negative feelings (“I’m feeling low”). Participants either rated the valence of or categorized a set of sad and happy faces gazing in different directions along the vertical axis. We expected to find a spatial-valence congruency effect, where valence ratings and reaction times would be moderated by whether or not the face was gazing in a metaphor-consistent direction. The results partially supported this hypothesis: sad faces gazing upwards (as opposed to downwards) were rated as happier or more positive (Experiments 1 and 2) and classified slower (Experiments 3 and 4). This was true whether looking direction was cued by eye gaze in front view faces (Experiment 1) or by the orientation of profile faces (Experiments 2-4). Additionally, this spatial-valence congruency effect was only reliable in the environmental frame of reference (Experiment 4). We found little evidence for a comparable effect of gaze direction on judgments of happy faces, suggesting that eye gaze along the vertical axis may differentially affect judgements of approach and avoidance-related emotional expressions. This has implications for the inferences scholars draw about underlying cognitive representations from observations of conventional metaphorical language.

The semantics of gaze in person perception: a novel qualitative-quantitative approach

“…This was especially true for effects concerning the direction of constant gaze and gaze shifts. However, the overall pattern of findings was largely consistent across experiments, corroborating and significantly extending prior research 34 , 43 , 44 , 47 – 50 .…”

“…We anticipated to replicate some previous findings, such as frequent (vs. infrequent) blinking and gaze shifting being rated less favorably 47 – 50 and downward gaze being associated with sadness and empathy 43 , 44 , especially in emotionally negative contexts 34 . Critically, our study aimed to substantially expand previous findings by considering a more comprehensive (and unbiased) range of evaluative dimensions regarding numerous distinct features of gaze behavior.…”

“…Critically, initial evidence suggests that the categorization of gaze into ‘direct’ and ‘averted’ might not be sufficient, as the interpretation of averted gaze can vary depending on where the gaze is directed 41 , 42 . For instance, downward gaze (but not sideward gaze) can be associated with sadness 43 , 44 .…”

Spatial Affective Interaction (SAI): A Framework for Research on Affective Processing by Manual Interactions with Digital Objects

“…Certain research areas focus on stimuli with particular content to address specific questions. For example, regarding (un)healthy food (e.g., Kahveci et al, 2021;Meule et al, 2020), smoking-related content (e.g., Eiler et al, 2020), phobia-related content (e.g., spiders; Rinck et al, 2021), or emotional faces (e.g., Flusberg et al, 2023;Kaye et al, 2022). It might be important to clarify the affective implications resulting from the direct interaction with such stimuli.…”