Emotion-diagnostic facial features guide social gaze across screen-based and interactive contexts

During face perception, observers preferentially attend to features that signal emotional expressions (e.g. the eye region of angry and the mouth of happy faces), reflecting their importance for inferring others' emotional states. Since previous research has demonstrated these effects primarily in highly controlled laboratory paradigms, it remains unclear whether they generalize to real-life social encounters and whether individual differences modulate visual attention across settings. To address this gap, we directly compared gaze behaviour in 69 participants across two contexts: a computerized task with angry, happy and neutral facial expressions and a face-to-face interaction with an experimenter displaying the same emotions during a naturalistic conversation. Although overall face-directed gaze was markedly reduced in the real-life context, enhanced exploration of emotion-diagnostic facial features was consistently observed across contexts. Specifically in the naturalistic interaction, this effect was modulated by trait social anxiety, with highly anxious individuals focusing more strongly on emotion-diagnostic features than those low in social anxiety, indicating increased sensitivity to emotional cues during live interaction. Collectively, these findings suggest that while some aspects of social gaze generalize across controlled laboratory and real-life contexts, a comprehensive understanding of context-dependent gaze adaptation requires more interactive and naturalistic paradigms supported by mobile data-acquisition methods.