The Influence Of Emotional Voice And Mood State On Gaze Perception

Gaze is an important behavior signal in social communication.It is particularly important to tell the gaze direction of others,especially the signal of direct gaze.As an important psychological process of individuals,emotion has an impact on the process of gaze perception.For example,facial emotional information and emotion-related states of individuals can affect the perception of gaze.In order to expand researches about the relation between emotion and gaze perception,this study explored the influence of emotional voice and mood state on gaze perception at the perspectives of the gaze sender and perceiver.In study 1,attention and non-attention conditions were set to explore the influence of emotional voice on the gaze cone(the range of gaze directions that constitutes"looking at" another person).Study 2 explored the influence of mood state on the stare-in-the-crowd effect by inducing different emotional states of subjects.The result shows that:(1)Whether under the attention condition or the non-attention condition,compared with the negative emotional voice information,the gaze cone under the positive emotional information condition is larger.(2)Whether under the attention condition or the non-attention condition,compared with the voice information pointing to others,the gaze cone under condition of the voice information pointing to subjects is larger.(3)Individuals'mood state did not affect the stare-in-the-crowd effect.These results show that there is a cross-modal integration between emotional voice information and gaze perception,and gaze perception is regulated by the self-correlation and emotional valence of voice information.In the process of processing information,individuals first filter the information initially according to whether it is relevant to themselves or not,then integrating and processing the information.Moreover,in the process of integration,positive emotional information is more conducive to the self-esteem of individuals,thus broadening the gaze cone.The sound information with self-correlation also leads to a larger gaze cone due to the consistency of position and motive tendency.However,individuals'mood state has no influence on the stare-in-the-crowd effect.The reason may be related to the clarity of gaze direction and other factors.In this study,the emotional voice and individual mood state were introduced into the research related to gaze perception,which enriched the research related to emotion and gaze perception.And the cross-modal integration of emotional voice and gaze perception was also found for the first time.