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. 2016 Sep 28;11(9):e0162695.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0162695. eCollection 2016.

Investigating the Effect of Gaze Cues and Emotional Expressions on the Affective Evaluations of Unfamiliar Faces

Todd Larson Landes  1 , Yoshihisa Kashima  1 , Piers D L Howe  1
Affiliations

Investigating the Effect of Gaze Cues and Emotional Expressions on the Affective Evaluations of Unfamiliar Faces

Todd Larson Landes et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

People look at what they are interested in, and their emotional expressions tend to indicate how they feel about the objects at which they look. The combination of gaze direction and emotional expression can therefore convey important information about people's evaluations of the objects in their environment, and can even influence the subsequent evaluations of those objects by a third party, a phenomenon known as the emotional gaze effect. The present study extended research into the effect of emotional gaze cues by investigating whether they affect evaluations of the most important aspect of our social environment-other people-and whether the presence of multiple gaze cues enhances this effect. Over four experiments, a factorial within-subjects design employing both null hypothesis significance testing and a Bayesian statistical analysis replicated previous work showing an emotional gaze effect for objects, but found strong evidence that emotional gaze cues do not affect evaluations of other people, and that multiple, simultaneously presented gaze cues do not enhance the emotional gaze effect for either the evaluations of objects or of people. Overall, our results suggest that emotional gaze cues have a relatively weak influence on affective evaluations, especially of those aspects of our environment that automatically elicit affectively valenced reactions, including other humans.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Cue face emotional expressions.
Cue face exhibiting a positive (left) and negative (right) expression. All individuals whose images are published in this paper gave written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to the publication of their image.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Categorisation trial.
Example of a categorisation trial in which a single cue face gazes at a target face with a negative expression.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Object stimuli.
Examples of a kitchen item (left) and a garage item (right) used as target stimuli in Experiment 2.
Fig 4
Fig 4. Emotion x gaze cue interaction.
Points represent marginal means, bars represent standard errors.
Fig 5
Fig 5. Examples of target objects used in Experiment 3.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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