Decoding the Silent Language of the Eyes: Occluding the Eye Region Impacts Understanding and Sharing of Emotions With Others

Abstract

Emotional expressions can be recognized from the eye region alone. However, it remains unknown how reading emotions from the eyes impacts downstream abilities that build on basic emotion recognition, including understanding (i.e., affective theory of mind) and sharing of emotions (i.e., affective empathy). In three experiments we investigated how occluding the eye region of emotional faces impacted judgments of affective theory of mind and affective empathy. Participants viewed emotional faces with eye regions covered by opaque occluders, transparent occluders, or no occluders. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants reported the protagonists’ emotional valence and intensity. In Experiment 3, participants rated their own empathy and emotional valence for the protagonist. When eyes were occluded, protagonists were judged to feel more neutral and less intense emotion and were empathized with less. This provides one of the first direct links between eye region information and the complex socioemotional processes of inferring and sharing emotions.