Visual exploration of emotional body language: a behavioural and eye-tracking study
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Visual exploration of emotional body language: a behavioural and eye‑tracking study M. Calbi1 · N. Langiulli1 · F. Siri1 · M. A. Umiltà2 · V. Gallese1,3 Received: 24 March 2020 / Accepted: 1 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Bodily postures are essential to correctly comprehend others’ emotions and intentions. Nonetheless, very few studies focused on the pattern of eye movements implicated in the recognition of emotional body language (EBL), demonstrating significant differences in relation to different emotions. A yet unanswered question regards the presence of the “left-gaze bias” (i.e. the tendency to look first, to make more fixations and to spend more looking time on the left side of centrally presented stimuli) while scanning bodies. Hence, the present study aims at exploring both the presence of a left-gaze bias and the modulation of EBL visual exploration mechanisms, by investigating the fixation patterns (number of fixations and latency of the first fixation) of participants while judging the emotional intensity of static bodily postures (Angry, Happy and Neutral, without head). While results on the latency of first fixations demonstrate for the first time the presence of the left-gaze bias while scanning bodies, suggesting that it could be related to the stronger expressiveness of the left hand (from the observer’s point of view), results on fixations’ number only partially fulfil our hypothesis. Moreover, an opposite viewing pattern between Angry and Happy bodily postures is showed. In sum, the present results, by integrating the spatial and temporal dimension of gaze exploration patterns, shed new light on EBL visual exploration mechanisms.
Introduction Bodily postures are crucial to correctly grasp others’ emotions and intentions (e.g., Calbi et al., 2017; Proverbio et al., 2014; de Gelder, 2009; de Gelder et al., 2010). Albeit a growing body of literature about the processing of emotional body language (EBL) has appeared in the last years, very few studies focused on the pattern of eye movements implicated in the recognition of EBL. To our knowledge, the first study aimed at investigating the gaze patterns associated with the perception of EBL was Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01416-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * M. Calbi [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Department of Medicine and Surgery, Unit of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Parma, Italy
2
Department of Food and Drug, University of Parma, Parma, Italy
3
Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
presented at a symposium only ten years ago (Fridin et al., 2009). The authors selected body postures expressing four different emotions (joy, sadness, anger and fear) and their results demonstrated significant differences among the visual exploration patterns in relation to the different emotio
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