Katharina Buczek
The researchers found that personality traits such as openness, agreeableness, and extraversion were positively linked with a heightened focus on faces. Similarly, individuals were more likely to focus on faces if they reported higher levels of empathy.
Conversely, the participants who scored higher on certain facets of psychopathology– such as depression, social anxiety, and alexithymia– were less likely to focus on faces.
Overall, the group of participants spent approximately 17% of their viewing time focusing on faces within the photos.
The researchers did note that the cursor positioning was slower than direct gazing, which makes it an imperfect way to track focus. Additionally, paying attention to faces in images is at least partly different from attention patterns in real-life settings.
Nonetheless, the results indicated that facial preferences might be associated with both personality and psychopathology levels.
“Pictures of human faces attract most people’s attention, but the phenomenon is weaker in people with higher levels of social anxiety, depression, and other forms of psychopathology,” the authors concluded.
To read the study’s complete findings, which have since been published in PLOS One, visit the link here.
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