To the question of eye movement analysis in the process of face perception. Perception of face attractiveness in people with different levels of emotional intelligence

Background. Many studies have been devoted to the relationship between the perception of facial expression and emotional intelligence (EI). As a rule, the study of this issue involved the tasks of expression recognition with stimuli expressing strong basic emotions. However, differences in the success of expression recognition in groups with different levels of EI are not always significantly pronounced. This may be connected to the fact, that the recognition of basic expressions is too easy for subjects with both high and low EI scores. In order to conduct a more effective study of this issue, it is necessary to complicate the task of facial expressions recognition. To this end, one of the configurational effects of E. Brunswick stating that neutral faces with different configurations of facial features are perceived as emotionally colored, can be used. Under these conditions, a more adequate task is not to assess the success of expression recognition, but to assess the attractiveness of the face, which is closely related to the perceived facial expression. Thus, faces with positive expressions are more often rated as attractive, and vice versa. It is assumed that the study of the perception of neutral faces will reveal the features of the relationship between the perception of facial expression and EI.

Objective. The study is meant to explore the relationship between the perception of facial attractiveness and EI. It was assumed that subjects with different levels of EI would evaluate the attractiveness of neutral faces differently.

Sample. The experiment involved 49 people (20 men and 29 women, in the age range of 18–35 years).

Methods. Images of faces were presented on a monitor screen. Eye movements were recorded during stimuli presentation. The level of EI was assessed based on the results of the “Test of emotional intelligence” (TEI) (Sergienko et al., 2019). We calculated indicators of TEI for all branches of EI (the abilities to recognize, understand, manage, and use emotions), as well as the total score of EI. An analysis of face attractiveness scores as well as eye movement parametres (duration and number of fixations, duration of saccades) was carried out for two groups of subjects with high and low EI scores.

Results. It has been shown that there is an inverse correlation between the ability to recognize emotions and the average scores of facial attractiveness: subjects from the group with a high ability to recognize emotions rated the attractiveness significantly lower than the group in which this ability was less developed. Other EI ability branches (understanding emotions, managing emotions, and using emotions), as well as the total EI score, were not significantly associated with facial attractiveness scores. Various explanations of the resulting phenomenon were discussed. There were no significant differences in the duration and number of fixations, in the amplitude of saccades, as well as in the distribution of dwell time in the Areas of Interest (AOI) when looking at facial images between groups with high and low EI scores.

Conclusion. It was found that subjects with a higher ability to recognize emotions tend to perceive neutral faces as unattractive. Also, no significant differences were found in eye movement scores for groups with high and low EI scores. The absence of differences in eye movements in groups was most likely to be explained by weak relationship (or lack of relationship) between visual perception and such a high-level construct as EI.

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