Effect of empathy trait on attention to positive emotional stimuli: evidence from eye movements

Empathy traits affect the processing of emotional information. Attentional characteristics of high-empathy people in processing positive emotions have received little empirical attention. We combined the dot-probe paradigm and eye tracker to investigate the specific components of attentional bias to happy faces and positive words among high- and low-empathy participants. The results showed that (1) in the attention-orienting phase, all participants had faster early-stage attention orienting to happy faces than that of positive words (a shorter time to first fixation), and (2) in the attention-maintenance phase, only high-empathy participants had longer late-stage attention maintenance to happy faces (a longer total fixation duration) than low-empathy participants. This study demonstrates that high-empathy participants show processing advantages in the attention orienting-maintenance modes to happy faces; facial expression has a higher sensitive index than emotional words.