Examining the effects of interoceptive awareness and self-focus on emotion perception from point-light dance movements: an eye tracking study

Emotional expressions are vital in human social interactions and effective communication. This study explored the influence of interoceptive awareness and self-focused attention on emotion perception from dynamic point-light dance movements along with the underlying eye behaviour. Eighty adult participants underwent random assignment into either the selffocus or control group, while considering age, gender, and interoceptive awareness. To assess interoceptive awareness, data were collected through both a heartbeat counting task and the implementation of the MAIA-2 Questionnaire. Self-focus group was supraminally primed with their self-face photograph with a neutral expression, prior to emotion recognition task. Consistent with prior research, the results revealed that participants with higher interoceptive awareness exhibited greater emotion recognition accuracy, alongside longer fixation durations, indicating increased attention to emotional stimuli. On the other hand, participants in the self-focus group demonstrated improved recognition of neutral stimuli. We interpret this finding that self-focus can enhance attention to the emotional expressions related to the self. Additionally, results revealed that females outperformed males in recognizing anger. Interestingly, females also displayed shorter fixation durations and higher fixation counts compared to males. While we found a similar fixation duration pattern in participants with low interoceptive awareness, females' shorter looking times at sad and neutral stimuli might suggest a potential higher experience or sensitivity to emotional cues. These findings were further discussed pointing to the roles of interoceptive awareness and self-focus in inferring the emotions of others as well as the underlying eye behaviour.