Facial Expression and Eye Gaze Direction: Are They Combined When Processing Emotionally Relevant Facial Information?

摘要

Understanding another individual's intentions is essential for everyday social interactions. Humans use various cues to predict future behaviour of their social interaction partners. A highly relevant stimulus in social interactions is the human face. From the emotional expression on somebody's face we can infer whether or not we want to approach and socially interact with him or her. An angry face might pose a threat, while a happy face denotes a benevolent attitude and may give rise to positive social interactions. A further important social cue is the direction of eye gaze. The direction where somebody is looking coupled with the emotional expression indicates whether the expressed emotion is indeed directed at me or elsewhere. Recent findings have suggested that gaze direction and facial expression are combined in order to process emotionally relevant facial information. This chapter reviews literature investigating the interrelationship between the processing of emotional expressions and eye gaze direction and discusses the theories that have been put forward to explain the meaningful interaction between emotion and eye gaze processing.