Eye Tracking: Social Behavior and How We Look at Faces

It’s no secret that eyes are incredibly expressive. Watch someone’s eyes during a conversation. They smile, they grieve, they fear, they laugh. You can see various emotions rising to the top as they interact with their surroundings, you included.

As humans, fixation on the eyes is critical in our perception of emotion and the communication of our own affective states, and researchers at Yale and Duke Universities in association with the Universities of Virginia and Groningen, Netherlands, recently sought out to determine the ways in which personality traits interact with our surrounding context to shape our own social behavior. Eye tracking technology was used to study precisely how people interact with others, scanning faces and observing which parts of the other persons face someone looks at most while communicating.

As the accompanying publication states, it is widely accepted that personality is made up from “many complex interactions between genes and the environment, and that it is an important aspect of who we are and how we perceive the world.” Many models of personality tendencies have been presented to account for individual differences in human social behavior, but it’s argued that specific traits account for only some of the variance in social behavior, and that human behavior, then, is affected by situational factors more than anything else. As we are an inherently visually oriented species, what better way to study situational factors than through eye tracking?

In an attempt to characterize individual differences in personality and eye contact with social partners, an essential human social behavior, researchers used eye tracking to measure visual scan paths of individuals with varying levels of five personality traits: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. These are five traits that transcend cultural boundaries and therefore a good approach to understanding human behavior and communication.

The article raises an interesting point of determinism, saying that specific personality traits predispose individuals to seek out and process information congruent with those characteristics.

This means, basically, that we seek out what we like or want to seek out based on our personality, and this enables and perpetuates our already consistent personality. Apparently, highly optimistic people demonstrate an increased attention to positive words and a slower latency for negative words than their pessimistic counterparts. Eye tracking has shown scan paths to be similar in nature; optimists are more likely to divert their gaze away from images of skin cancer than are pessimists.

In the study, researchers focused on highly anxious people, as they are shown to exhibit a hyper vigilance to negative social stimuli. People with higher levels of anxiety tend to “hyper scan” others’ faces, making many fixations and saccades and devoting far more attention to another’s eyes.

Individual Differences in Personality Predict How People Look at Faces

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