The Role of Trait Anxiety in the Interaction between Eye Gaze and Facial Expressions

Previous research revealed an interaction between eye gaze and emotional facial expressions. There are also evidences that elevated levels of trait anxiety are associated with an increased ability to accurately recognize facial expressions of fear, and enhanced cueing effect of eye gaze of fearful faces. In this study, we investigate the relationship between facial expression and gaze processing with the Garner selective attention paradigm, taking individual differences in trait anxiety into account. Results indicated that facial expression interferes with eye gaze judgments, but gaze does not influence perception of facial expressions. These findings were not stimulus-bound. Furthermore, no anxiety-related differences in the interactions were found. Thus, our study reveals that anxiety does not play an important role in the interaction between eye gaze and facial expressions. Previous findings that anxiety may facilitate cuing effect of gaze direction of fear faces might be task-bound.