高共情者加工情绪刺激的注意特征及其眼动证据

Attentional Characteristics of High-Empathy People in Processing Emotional Stimuli and Evidence of Eye Movements

共情特质影响情绪信息加工的情境适切程度。采用点探测范式并结合眼动追踪技术,以词语和面孔表情为实验材料,探讨高低共情被试对不同类型刺激材料的注意偏向及具体成分的时间进程特点。结果发现,虽然高低共情被试都对负性刺激表现出早期注意定向,但只有高共情被试对悲伤面孔的晚期注意维持更长。这表明面孔表情是区分共情特质注意偏向更有效的实验材料;高共情被试对悲伤面孔表情的加工有助于心灵感知。

Empathy refers to the ability of an individual in understanding someone＇s feeling, which is vital for individual development and interpersonal concordance. Mind-to-mind perception and mind reading are the two trends in the study of inter-subjectivity in psychology. To understand and resonate with others＇ emotions, the empathetic individual primarily depends on two inputs： situational understanding and an emotional clues classification system. One can perceive other people＇s inner feelings through others＇ emotional clues （such as facial expressions） and can also make inferences based on other clues （such as emotional words）. Although studies on the effect of empathy on emotional information processing generally used facial expressions as experiment stimuli, a few studies demonstrated that there were some different neural mechanisms in the cognitive processing of faces and words. To the best of our knowledge, however, it is not clear whether the attentional bias of words and facial expressions is consistent for high-empathy people. Is the high-empathy individual more inclined to understand the emotions of others rather than simply the classification and representation of emotional clues？ Current methodology cannot detect the whole attention process and cannot explore the attention distribution when stimuli is presented. Eye movement technology can help us to resolve these limitations. It provides sensitive index for the attentional components of orientation and maintenance, so it becomes an important tool to study attention bias toward emotional information. This study combined the dot-probe paradigm and eye tracker to investigate the specific components of attentional bias toward words and faces. Fifty-five subjects were screened and selected for the high-and low-empathy groups （29 people in the high-empathy group） based on the total scores obtained on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index （IRI） questionnaire. The experiment was a 2 （subject type： high-empathy, low-empathy） × 2 （experimental material： words, faces） × 3 （paired condition： negative-consistent, negative-inconsistent, neutral-neutral） mixed design. The experiment stimuli were selected from the Chinese Affective Words System and the Chinese Face Affective Picture System. Using previous studies, the initial orienting of attention was measured by the time to first fixation; attention maintenance was measured by total fixation duration. In addition, subjects＇ reaction times for judging the position of the probing point were recorded. Results showed that： （1） In the attention-orienting phase, both groups of subjects had faster early-stage attention orienting toward emotional stimuli than toward neutral stimuli （a shorter time to first fixation）, particularly toward sad faces; and high-empathy subjects directed their attention more quickly to the faces than the words; （2） In the attention-maintenance phase, the total fixation time of sad faces was longer than the total fixation time of negative words; an independent-samples t-test showed that high-empathy subjects had longer late-stage attention maintenance toward sad faces （a longer total fixation duration） than low-empathy subjects. There was no difference in reaction times under different experiment paired conditions. This study demonstrates that facial expressions are more sensitive index than words and that high-empathy subjects show processing advantages in the attention orienting-maintenance modes toward sad faces. This result provides an important empirical basis for interpersonal mind-to-mind perception and provides reference for the cultivation of empathy trait from the perspective of psychological processing.