Corresponding Author Information: Shiyi Xu
Session Abstract: Psychologists have been interested in assessing personality via non-verbal information for a long time. With the current advancement of technology, more and more researchers have experimented the eye-tracking techniques for a novel assessment of personality traits. Nevertheless, there are also increasing questions regarding the psychometric validity issues. The current study is aimed at addressing such issues by meta-analyzing articles that have been published in this area. The results revealed that eye-tracking techniques are most effective in detecting extraversion, followed by openness and neuroticism, yet least effective for agreeableness and conscientiousness. In terms of eye-tracking metrics, we found that fixations and blinks are the most predictive of personality traits.
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:
Psychologists have been interested in assessing personality via non-verbal information for a long time. With the current advancement of technology, more and more researchers have experimented the eye-tracking techniques for a novel assessment of personality traits. We hypothesize that eye-tracking techniques will be more effective for measuring emotion related to personality traits such as extraversion and neuroticism and non-emotion related traits such as conscientiousness and agreeableness.
SUBJECT(S):
We conducted a meta-analysis with a total of 1,031 healthy participants, the majority of who were adults.
METHODS AND MATERIALS:
We conducted a literature search on APA PsycINFO database via the Columbia University Libraries and sought articles that include the keyword eye and personality in their abstract section. There were a total of 731 published academic journals found, with publication dates ranging from 1907 to 2020. Second, we reviewed all the abstracts and excluded articles that have clinical, psychiatrical, psychobiological, or physiological implications. In other words, we did not include articles that study neurotransmitters (e.g., dopamine, GABA, etc.), medicines (e.g., benzodiazepine agonist, midazolam, etc.), various personality disorders, autism, schizophrenia, alexithymia, rapid-eye-movement (REM), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM), or use the Reading The Mind in The Eyes Test (RMET), electroencephalogram (EEG), electrooculogram (EOG), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) as part of their research. Lastly, we excluded articles that were published in another language other than English or could not be accessed online without a fee.
Our inclusion criterion for this meta-analysis included: 1) an article should have a healthy sample population; 2) an article should include at least one eye-tracking metrics; 3) an article should report relationship(s) between eye-tracking metrics and at least one of the Big Five personality traits (i.e., Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). Furthermore, we excluded articles that assess the relationship between personality traits and accuracy rate since accuracy is a behavioral measure, not an eye-tracking measure. This resulted 11 articles with 13 unique studies for this meta-analysis.
ANALYSES:
We developed R script to analyze the data by using the psychmeta R package. The calculation included meta-analytical effect size across all the five traits in the Big Five Model.
RESULTS:
The results revealed that eye-tracking techniques are most effective in detecting extraversion, followed by openness and neuroticism, yet least effective for agreeableness and conscientiousness.
In terms of eye-tracking metrics, we found that fixations and blinks are the most predictive of personality traits.
CONCLUSIONS:
We concluded that eye-tracking techniques are promising for personality assessments, especially for traits that are affectively based such as extraversion, neuroticism, and openness.
Presenters:
Shiyi Xu | Columbia University
Christian Martinez | Graduate Center, CUNY
Wei Wang | Graduate Center, CUNY