Evidence Of Visual Processing Of Empathy

Empathy refers to the ability of individual to understand the emotions of others and make an appropriate response,which plays an important role in speed of capturing and depth of processing of emotional information.So far,few studies have systematically investigated the influence of empathy trait to the mechanism of emotional information attention bias,including different cognitive resource conditions and types of emotional information and time course of attentional bias components.From the social cognitive perspective and by questionnaire survey and experimental methods and eye movement,this study aimed to explore the effect of empathy to attentional bias and specific components time processes under the different cognitive resources and different types of emotional information.This reasearch included two studies with a total of 4 experiments to examine the effect of empathy trait to emotional information attention bias.Study 1 adopted emotional Stroop task and used emotional words and faces in experiment 1 and 2respectively to explore whether participants show attentional bias towards emotional information or not.In study 2,we adopted dot probe task with eye movement and emotional words and faces was used in experiment 3and 4 respectively to explore directly and precisely the time course of attentional bias components.The results of study1 suggested that all participants showed negative attentional bias(longer reaction time and fixation time,more fixation counts),especially for sad faces.Study 2 showed that all participants directed their attention more fast to emotional information than neutral information at the attention orientation stage.At the attention maintenance stage,participants have more fixation count and longer fixation duration for the emotional stimulus than the neutral ones,and the participants of high empathy have longer fixation duration than the participants of low empathy.Furthermore,participants with high empathy have longer fixation duration and more fixation count for happy and sad faces than participants with low empathy.This study indicated that only under the conditions of low cognitive resources consumption and face stimulus,could participants with high empathy play the processing advantages of attention orientation-maintenance pattern towards emotional information,which provided a reference for the optimization of trait empathy.