Abstract
The influence of facial emotions on gaze patterns when exploring faces is still debated. Previous research reported that the relative proportion of fixations on the different face areas is (Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011; Schurgin et al., 2014) or is not (Blais et al., 2017, de Boer et al., 2020) modulated by the expression processed. While most previous studies used static face images or simulated dynamic facial expressions (Blais et al., 2017), we propose to test how these findings generalize to more ecological spontaneous dynamic expressions of emotion. We recorded the eye movements of 170 participants with different empathy profiles, while categorizing the valence of static and dynamic emotional faces. Static emotions were performed by actors from the classic Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database (KDEF, Lundqvist et al., 1998), while dynamic emotions were genuine natural facial expressions from ordinary people, filmed in natural but standardized conditions (DynEmo database, Tcherkassof et al., 2013). We found strong similarities between the gaze patterns in static and dynamic conditions. We found a main effect of emotion on fixation rate on all facial regions of interest (left and right eye, nasion, nose, mouth, rest of the face). In both conditions, we only found an effect of empathy on fixation rate on the left eye, which was less fixated when the observer had less empathy. We did not find any effect of gender on fixation rates. Our results suggest that moderate differences in gaze behavior like the ones associated with the observer’s empathy profile can generalize from a classic and well controlled static dataset, to a more ecological and dynamic dataset.