The Influence Of Individual's Empathy On Attention Shifts Of Visual Cues

The cuing effect refers to the spatial position.When the target appears in the direction of the cue stimulus,the individual's detection response to the target is accelerated.In the study of social attention transfer caused by visual cues,the cuing effect of eye gaze was found.This is when the observer finds that others are looking at a certain position or direction,which will accelerate the observer's attention to the same direction or position.Eye gaze direction is a kind of interpersonal communication information that can convey non-verbal and contains other people's interests,motivations,etc.Individuals can guess the mental state and behavioral intentions of others by observing the focus of other people's gaze.Some studies believe that this is a theory of mind.The important founding of ability development is the individual's ability to perceive and understand the mental state and behavior of others.It is closely related to the development of the level of empathy and plays an important role in social interpersonal communication activities.Based on this,this study conjectures that individuals with a high level of empathy should be more sensitive to interpersonal interaction information.In the process of social attention transfer,they should process cues containing interpersonal communication information faster.This study designed two experiments to screen out individuals with different levels of empathy by using questionnaire measurements.By controlling different cue stimuli and cue target interval,and the spatial cues paradigm was used to investigate the effect of empathy on the attention transfer process of visual cues.In the first experiment,30 people with high and low empathy were screened out,using 2(empathy level: high,low)× 2(cue type: arrow,eye)× 2(cue validity: valid,invalid)× 2(cue target interval time: 200,300 milliseconds)a four-factor mixed experimental design to explore whether empathy affects the attention transfer of arrow cues and whether empathy affects the attention transfer of eye cues.The results were found in the grouping of empathy dimensions: under the cue of eye cues,there is a tendency for individuals with higher empathy to detect targets faster than those with lower empathy,indicating that the level of empathy affects the process of attention transfer.Moderating role of cue type existed.Under the 200 millisecond cue-target interval,there isa tendency for individuals with high empathy to respond faster than low empathy,indicating that the cue-target interval can adjust the effect of empathy on the attention transfer process.Under the cue target interval time,the processing of cue stimulation can be completed.On the basis of experiment 1,experiment 2 included emotional information to the eye cues.The cue stimulation was synthesized by computer software.The left-eye and right-eye emotional face models of the same magnitude were screened for each of 32 subjects with high and low empathy.Using 2(level of empathy: high,low)× 3(types of emotional face gaze cues: happy,neutral,angry)× 2(cue validity: valid,invalid)× 2(cue target interval time: 500 milliseconds,700 milliseconds)four-factor mixed experimental design to further explore the impact of empathy level and cue target interval time on the attention transfer process under the cues that need to integrate emotions with the direction of the eyes.The results show that empathy affects the attention transfer process of emotional faces' eyes and cues.High empathy individuals' response to angry eyes' cues is lower than that of neutral and angry faces.The cue effect has a moderating effect by empathy.For high empathy individuals,eye-oriented cue effect is greater under anger and neutral faces than that under happy faces.The effect of cue target interval on individual empathy exists in the process of social attention transfer.It plays a moderating role.Compared with high empathy individuals and low empathy individuals,the regulating effect of emotional faces on eye cues(that is,the cues of anger and neutral emotional faces are greater than those of happy emotional faces)appear on longer cue targets interval time.