Parent-Child Eye Gaze Congruency to Emotional Expressions Mediated by Child Aesthetic Sensitivity

Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS), particularly its aesthetic subcomponent (Aesthetic Sensitivity; AES), has been linked to individual differences in emotional processing. This study examined whether parental visual attention to emotional facial expressions predicts corresponding attentional patterns in their children, and whether this intergenerational concordance is mediated by child AES and moderated by child empathy.

A sample of 124 Greek Cypriot parent-child dyads (children aged 7-12 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment. Both parents and children viewed static emotional facial expressions (angry, sad, fearful, happy). Parents also completed questionnaires assessing their child's SPS, empathy (cognitive and affective), and emotional functioning. Regression analyses and moderated mediation models were employed to explore associations between parental and child gaze patterns.

Children's fixation on angry eyes was significantly predicted by parental fixation duration on the same region, as well as by child AES and empathy levels. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that the association between parent and child gaze to angry eyes was significantly mediated by child AES. However, neither cognitive nor affective empathy significantly moderated this mediation effect.

Findings suggest that child AES plays a key mediating role in the intergenerational transmission of attentional biases to emotional stimuli. While empathy was independently associated with children's gaze behavior, it did not moderate the AES-mediated pathway. These results highlight the importance of trait-level child sensitivity in shaping shared emotional attention patterns within families.