A dual eye tracking study: Uncovering gaze patterns during live conversations with different emotional content

Abstract

The importance of the gaze has mesmerized writers, psychologists, philosophers and body language experts for ages. Despite the importance of social context, most studies that investigate gaze behavior have employed pictures of faces or social scenes, thereby ignoring the possible dynamics in gaze behavior when social partners are physically present. Hence, the aim of this study is to allow social interaction between participants while recording their gaze. We designed an experiment where the participants were asked to converse about pictures with different emotional content, while their gaze behavior was being recorded by two Tobii eye trackers. The results suggest that there is bias towards looking at specific features of the face, but that this is not caused by the emotional content of the conversations. This outcome might have been influenced by situational and dispositional circumstance