Search for: All records

Abstract The enhancement hypothesis suggests that deaf individuals are more vigilant to visual emotional cues than hearing individuals. The present eye-tracking study examined ambient–focal visual attention when encoding affect from dynamically changing emotional facial expressions. Deaf (n = 17) and hearing (n = 17) individuals watched emotional facial expressions that in 10-s animations morphed from a neutral expression to one of happiness, sadness, or anger. The task was to recognize emotion as quickly as possible. Deaf participants tended to be faster than hearing participants in affect recognition, but the groups did not differ in accuracy. In general, happy faces were more accurately and more quickly recognized than faces expressing anger or sadness. Both groups demonstrated longer average fixation duration when recognizing happiness in comparison to anger and sadness. Deaf individuals directed their first fixations less often to the mouth region than the hearing group. During the last stages of emotion recognition, deaf participants exhibited more focal viewing of happy faces than negative faces. This pattern was not observed among hearing individuals. The analysis of visual gaze dynamics, switching between ambient and focal attention, was useful in studying the depth of cognitive processing of emotional information among deaf and hearing individuals. 

This paper demonstrates the utility of ambient-focal attention and pupil dilation dynamics to describe visual processing of emotional facial expressions. Pupil dilation and focal eye movements reflect deeper cognitive processing and thus shed more light on the dy- namics of emotional expression recognition. Socially anxious in- dividuals (N = 24) and non-anxious controls (N = 24) were asked to recognize emotional facial expressions that gradually morphed from a neutral expression to one of happiness, sadness, or anger in 10-sec animations. Anxious cohorts exhibited more ambient face scanning than their non-anxious counterparts. We observed a positive relationship between focal fixations and pupil dilation, indi- cating deeper processing of viewed faces, but only by non-anxious participants, and only during the last phase of emotion recognition. Group differences in the dynamics of ambient-focal attention sup- port the hypothesis of vigilance to emotional expression processing by socially anxious individuals. We discuss the results by referring to current literature on cognitive psychopathology.