Empathy refers to the ability of an individual to understand and feel someone else’s affect ,which is vital for individual development and interpersonal harmony.Mind perception and mind reading are the two trends in the study of intersubjectivity in psychology.Moreover,empathy is an important embodiment of the perception of the mind.In order to understand and resonate to others' emotion,empathy individual mainly depends on two inputs:situational understanding system and emotional clues classification system. One can perceive other people’s inner feelings through others’ emotional clues (such as facial expression),and also can make inferences based on situations (such as emotional words)when such intuitive emotional clues are lacking.Although the studies of effect of empathy on emotional information processing generally use facial expressions as experiment stimuli,a few researches demonstrate that there are some different neural mechanisms in cognitive processing of faces and words.To our knowledge,however,it is not clear whether the attentional bias of words and facial expressions is consistent or not for high-empathy people.Does high-empathy individual tend to be more inclined to understand the emotions of others instead of just the classification and representation of emotional clues? Methods:This research combine the dot-probe paradigm and eye movement technology to investigate the specific components of attentional bias toward words and faces.55 subjects were screened and selected for the high-and low-empathy groups(29 people in the high-empathy group) based on the total scores obtained on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) questionnaire.The experiment was a 2(subject type:high-empathy,low-empathy)×2(experimental material:words,faces)×3(paired condition:negative-consistent,negative-inconsistent,neutral-neutral) mixed design.The experiment stimuli of words and faces was selected from Chinese Affective Words System and Chinese Face Affective Picture System respectively.According to previous studies,initial orienting of attention was measured as the time to first fixation;attention maintenance was measured by total fixation duration.Besides,subjects’ reaction time for judging the position of the probing point were recorded. Results:In the attention orienting phase,both groups of subjects had faster early-stage attention orienting toward emotional stimuli than toward neutral stimuli(a shorter time to first fixation),particularly toward sad faces;and high-empathy subjects directed their attention more quickly to the faces than the words.In the attention maintenance phase,the total fixation time of sad faces was longer than the total fixation time of negative words;an Independent-Samples T Test showed that high-empathy subjects had longer late-stage attention maintenance toward sad faces (a longer total fixation duration)than low-empathy subjects.There was no difference under different experiment paired conditions in reaction time. Conclusion:This study demonstrates that facial expressions is a more index than words and the high-empathy subjects show processing advantage in the attention orienting-maintenance modes toward sad faces，which provide an important empirical basis for interpersonal mind perception.