Effects of dopamine and opioid receptor antagonism on the neural processing of social and nonsocial rewards.

Rewards are a broad category of stimuli inducing approach behavior to aid survival. Extensive evidence from animal research has shown that wanting (the motivation to pursue a reward) and liking (the pleasure associated with its consumption) are mostly regulated by dopaminergic and opioidergic activity in dedicated brain areas. However, less is known about the neuroanatomy of dopaminergic and opioidergic regulation of reward processing in humans, especially when considering different types of rewards (i.e., social and nonsocial). To fill this gap of knowledge, we combined dopaminergic and opioidergic antagonism (via amisulpride and naltrexone administration) with functional neuroimaging to investigate the neurochemical and neuroanatomical bases of wanting and liking of matched nonsocial (food) and social (interpersonal touch) rewards, using a randomized, between-subject, placebo-controlled, double-blind design. While no drug effect was observed at the behavioral level, brain activity was modulated by the administered compounds. In particular, opioid antagonism, compared to placebo, reduced activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex during consumption of the most valued social and nonsocial rewards. Dopamine antagonism, however, had no clear effects on brain activity in response to reward anticipation. These findings provide insights into the neurobiology of human reward processing and suggest a similar opioidergic regulation of the neural responses to social and nonsocial reward consumption.

Emotional self-body odors do not influence the access to visual awareness by emotional faces.

A growing body of research suggests that emotional chemosignals in others' body odor (BO), particularly those sampled during fearful states, enhance emotional face perception in conscious and preconscious stages. For instance, emotional faces access visual awareness faster when presented with others' fear BOs. However, the effect of these emotional signals in self-BO, that is, one's own BO, is still neglected in the literature. In the present work, we sought to determine whether emotional self-BOs modify the access to visual awareness of emotional faces. Thirty-eight women underwent a breaking-Continuous Flash Suppression task in which they were asked to detect fearful, happy, and neutral faces, as quickly and accurately as possible, while being exposed to their fear, happiness, and neutral self-BOs. Self-BOs were previously collected and later delivered via an olfactometer, using an event-related design. Results showed a main effect of emotional faces, with happy faces being detected significantly faster than fearful and neutral faces. However, our hypothesis that fear self-BOs would lead to faster emotional face detection was not confirmed, as no effect of emotional self-BOs was found-this was confirmed with Bayesian analysis. Although caution is warranted when interpreting these results, our findings suggest that emotional face perception is not modulated by emotional self-BOs, contrasting with the literature on others' BOs. Further research is needed to understand the role of self-BOs in visual processing and emotion perception.

Application of facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) in psychophysiological research: Practical recommendations based on a systematic review of the literature.

Facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES), which allows for the non-invasive and physiologically sound activation of facial muscles, has great potential for investigating fundamental questions in psychology and neuroscience, such as the role of proprioceptive facial feedback in emotion induction and emotion recognition, and may serve for clinical applications, such as alleviating symptoms of depression. However, despite illustrious origins in the 19th-century work of Duchenne de Boulogne, the practical application of fNMES remains largely unknown to today's researchers in psychology. In addition, published studies vary dramatically in the stimulation parameters used, such as stimulation frequency, amplitude, duration, and electrode size, and in the way they reported them. Because fNMES parameters impact the comfort and safety of volunteers, as well as its physiological (and psychological) effects, it is of paramount importance to establish recommendations of good practice and to ensure studies can be better compared and integrated. Here, we provide an introduction to fNMES, systematically review the existing literature focusing on the stimulation parameters used, and offer recommendations on how to safely and reliably deliver fNMES and on how to report the fNMES parameters to allow better cross-study comparison. In addition, we provide a free webpage, to easily visualise fNMES parameters and verify their safety based on current density. As an example of a potential application, we focus on the use of fNMES for the investigation of the facial feedback hypothesis.

Slower access to visual awareness but otherwise intact implicit perception of emotional faces in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

Schizophrenia-spectrum disorders are characterized by deficits in social domains. Extant research has reported an impaired ability to perceive emotional faces in schizophrenia. Yet, it is unclear if these deficits occur already in the access to visual awareness. To investigate this question, 23 people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 22 healthy controls performed a breaking continuous flash suppression task with fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Response times were analysed with generalized linear mixed models. People with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders were slower than controls in detecting faces, but did not show emotion-specific impairments. Moreover, happy faces were detected faster than neutral and fearful faces, across all participants. Although caution is needed when interpreting the main effect of group, our findings may suggest an elevated threshold for visual awareness in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, but an intact implicit emotion perception. Our study provides a new insight into the mechanisms underlying emotion perception in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

Not All Emotions Are Equal: Fear Chemosignals Lower Awareness Thresholds Only for Fearful Faces.

Exposure to body odors (chemosignals) collected under different emotional states (i.e., emotional chemosignals) can modulate our visual system, biasing visual perception. Recent research has suggested that exposure to fear body odors, results in a generalized faster access to visual awareness of different emotional facial expressions (i.e., fear, happy, and neutral). In the present study, we aimed at replicating and extending these findings by exploring if these effects are limited to fear odor, by introducing a second negative body odor-that is, disgust. We compared the time that 3 different emotional facial expressions (i.e., fear, disgust, and neutral) took to reach visual awareness, during a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm, across 3 body odor conditions (i.e., fear, disgust, and neutral). We found that fear body odors do not trigger an overall faster access to visual awareness, but instead sped-up access to awareness specifically for facial expressions of fear. Disgust odor, on the other hand, had no effects on awareness thresholds of facial expressions. These findings contrast with prior results, suggesting that the potential of fear body odors to induce visual processing adjustments is specific to fear cues. Furthermore, our results support a unique ability of fear body odors in inducing such visual processing changes, compared with other negative emotional chemosignals (i.e., disgust). These conclusions raise interesting questions as to how fear odor might interact with the visual processing stream, whilst simultaneously giving rise to future avenues of research.

Face proprioception does not modulate access to visual awareness of emotional faces in a continuous flash suppression paradigm.

An important question in neuroscience is which multisensory information, presented outside of awareness, can influence the nature and speed of conscious access to our percepts. Recently, proprioceptive feedback of the hand was reported to lead to faster awareness of congruent hand images in a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm. Moreover, a vast literature suggests that spontaneous facial mimicry can improve emotion recognition, even without awareness of the stimulus face. However, integration of visual and proprioceptive information about the face to date has not been tested with CFS. The modulation of visual awareness of emotional faces by facial proprioception was investigated across three separate experiments. Face proprioception was induced with voluntary facial expressions or with spontaneous facial mimicry. Frequentist statistical analyses were complemented with Bayesian statistics. No evidence of multisensory integration was found, suggesting that proprioception does not modulate access to visual awareness of emotional faces in a CFS paradigm.

Sniff and mimic - Intranasal oxytocin increases facial mimicry in a sample of men.

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has many potential social benefits. For example, intranasal administration of OT appears to trigger caregiving behavior and to improve the recognition of emotional facial expressions. But the mechanism for these effects is not yet clear. Recent findings relating OT to action imitation and to the visual processing of the eye region of faces point to mimicry as a mechanism through which OT improves processing of emotional expression. To test the hypothesis that increased levels of OT in the brain enhance facial mimicry, 60 healthy male participants were administered, in a double-blind between-subjects design, 24 international units (IUs) of OT or placebo (PLA) through nasal spray. Facial mimicry and emotion judgments were recorded in response to movie clips depicting changing facial expressions. As expected, facial mimicry was increased in the OT group, but effects were strongest for angry infant faces. These findings provide further evidence for the importance of OT in social cognitive skills, and suggest that facial mimicry mediates the effects of OT on improved emotion recognition.

Neural Hyperresponsivity During the Anticipation of Tangible Social and Nonsocial Rewards in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Concurrent Neuroimaging and Facial Electromyography Study.

BACKGROUND: Atypical anticipation of social reward has been shown to lie at the core of the social challenges faced by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, previous research has yielded inconsistent results and has often overlooked crucial characteristics of stimuli. Here, we investigated ASD reward processing using social and nonsocial tangible stimuli, carefully matched on several key dimensions. METHODS: We examined the anticipation and consumption of social (interpersonal touch) and nonsocial (flavored milk) rewards in 25 high-functioning individuals with ASD and 25 neurotypical adult individuals. In addition to subjective ratings of wanting and liking, we measured physical energetic expenditure to obtain the rewards, brain activity with neuroimaging, and facial reactions through electromyography on a trial-by-trial basis. RESULTS: Participants with ASD did not exhibit reduced motivation for social or nonsocial rewards; their subjective ratings, motivated efforts, and facial reactions were comparable to those of neurotypical participants. However, anticipation of higher-value rewards increased neural activation in lateral parietal cortices, sensorimotor regions, and the orbitofrontal cortex. Moreover, participants with ASD exhibited hyperconnectivity between frontal medial regions and occipital regions and the thalamus. CONCLUSIONS: Individuals with ASD who experienced rewards with tangible characteristics, whether social or nonsocial, displayed typical subjective and objective motivational and hedonic responses. Notably, the observed hyperactivations in sensory and attentional nodes during anticipation suggest atypical sensory overprocessing of forthcoming rewards rather than decreased reward value. While these atypicalities may not have manifested in observable behavior here, they could impact real-life social interactions that require nuanced predictions, potentially leading to the misperception of reduced interest in rewarding social stimuli in ASD.

Zygomaticus activation through facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) induces happiness perception in ambiguous facial expressions and affects neural correlates of face processing.

The role of facial feedback in facial emotion recognition remains controversial, partly due to limitations of the existing methods to manipulate the activation of facial muscles, such as voluntary posing of facial expressions or holding a pen in the mouth. These procedures are indeed limited in their control over which muscles are (de)activated when and to what degree. To overcome these limitations and investigate in a more controlled way if facial emotion recognition is modulated by one's facial muscle activity, we used computer-controlled facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES). In a pre-registered EEG experiment, ambiguous facial expressions were categorised as happy or sad by 47 participants. In half of the trials, weak smiling was induced through fNMES delivered to the bilateral Zygomaticus Major muscle for 500 ms. The likelihood of categorising ambiguous facial expressions as happy was significantly increased with fNMES, as shown with frequentist and Bayesian linear mixed models. Further, fNMES resulted in a reduction of P1, N170 and LPP amplitudes. These findings suggest that fNMES-induced facial feedback can bias facial emotion recognition and modulate the neural correlates of face processing. We conclude that fNMES has potential as a tool for studying the effects of facial feedback.

Emotional anticipation for dynamic emotional faces is not modulated by schizotypal traits: A Representational Momentum study.

Schizotypy, a personality structure that resembles schizophrenia symptoms, is often associated with abnormal facial emotion perception. Based on the prevailing sense of threat in psychotic experiences, and the immediate perceptual history of seeing others' facial expressions, individuals with high schizotypal traits may exhibit a heightened tendency to anticipate anger. To test this, we used insights from Representational Momentum (RM), a perceptual phenomenon in which the endpoint of a dynamic event is systematically displaced forward, into the immediate future. Angry-to-ambiguous and happy-to-ambiguous avatar faces were presented, each followed by a probe with the same (ambiguous) expression as the endpoint, or one slightly changed to express greater happiness/anger. Participants judged if the probe was "equal" to the endpoint and rated how confident they were. The sample was divided into high (N = 46) and low (N = 49) schizotypal traits using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ). First, a forward bias was found in happy-to-ambiguous faces, suggesting emotional anticipation solely for dynamic faces changing towards a potential threat (anger). This may reflect an adaptative mechanism, as it is safer to anticipate any hostility from a conspecific than the opposite. Second, contrary to our hypothesis, high schizotypal traits did not heighten RM for happy-to-ambiguous faces, nor did they lead to overconfidence in biased judgements. This may suggest a typical pattern of emotional anticipation in non-clinical schizotypy, but caution is needed due to the use of self-report questionnaires, university students, and a modest sample size. Future studies should also investigate if the same holds for clinical manifestations of schizophrenia.

Inhibiting orofacial mimicry affects authenticity perception in vocal emotions.

Although emotional mimicry is ubiquitous in social interactions, its mechanisms and roles remain disputed. A prevalent view is that imitating others' expressions facilitates emotional understanding, but the evidence is mixed and almost entirely based on facial emotions. In a preregistered study, we asked whether inhibiting orofacial mimicry affects authenticity perception in vocal emotions. Participants listened to authentic and posed laughs and cries, while holding a pen between the teeth and lips to inhibit orofacial responses (n = 75), or while responding freely without a pen (n = 75). They made authenticity judgments and rated how much they felt the conveyed emotions (emotional contagion). Mimicry inhibition decreased the accuracy of authenticity perception in laughter and crying, and in posed and authentic vocalizations. It did not affect contagion ratings, however, nor performance in a cognitive control task, ruling out the effort of holding the pen as an explanation for the decrements in authenticity perception. Laughter was more contagious than crying, and authentic vocalizations were more contagious than posed ones, regardless of whether mimicry was inhibited or not. These findings confirm the role of mimicry in emotional understanding and extend it to auditory emotions. They also imply that perceived emotional contagion can be unrelated to mimicry. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Facial mimicry is not modulated by dopamine D2/3 and opioid receptor antagonism.

RATIONALE: According to theories of embodied cognition, facial mimicry - the spontaneous, low-intensity imitation of a perceived emotional facial expression - is first an automatic motor response, whose accompanying proprioceptive feedback contributes to emotion recognition. Alternative theoretical accounts, however, view facial mimicry as an emotional response to a rewarding stimulus, and/or an affiliative signal, and thus reject the view of an automatic motor copy. OBJECTIVES: To contribute to this debate and further investigate the neural basis of facial mimicry, as well as its relation to reward processing, we measured facial reactions to dynamic happy and angry faces after pharmacologically manipulating the opioid and dopamine systems - respectively, thought to subserve 'liking' and 'wanting' of rewards. METHODS: In a placebo-controlled, double-blind experiment, 130 volunteers received in a between-subjects design 50 mg of the opioidergic antagonist naltrexone, 400 mg of the dopaminergic antagonist amisulpride, or placebo. RESULTS: Clear occurrence of facial mimicry, measured 4 h after drug intake with electromyography (EMG) of the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii muscles, was found. However, facial mimicry was not affected by either compound, as shown with both frequentist statistics, and a Bayesian asymptotic regression model. CONCLUSIONS: This null finding does not support the hypothesis that facial mimicry (of happiness) reflects an emotional response to a rewarding stimulus, leaving open the possibility of facial mimicry being an automatic motor copy. The results are relevant to the discussion about the psychological nature and the neural basis of facial mimicry, although they should be considered preliminary, given the challenges of interpreting null findings when targeting a novel effect of unknown size.

EmoSex: Emotion prevails over sex in implicit judgments of faces and voices.

Appraisals can be influenced by cultural beliefs and stereotypes. In line with this, past research has shown that judgments about the emotional expression of a face are influenced by the face's sex, and vice versa that judgments about the sex of a person somewhat depend on the person's facial expression. For example, participants associate anger with male faces, and female faces with happiness or sadness. However, the strength and the bidirectionality of these effects remain debated. Moreover, the interplay of a stimulus' emotion and sex remains mostly unknown in the auditory domain. To investigate these questions, we created a novel stimulus set of 121 avatar faces and 121 human voices (available at https://bit.ly/2JkXrpy) with matched, fine-scale changes along the emotional (happy to angry) and sexual (male to female) dimensions. In a first experiment (N = 76), we found clear evidence for the mutual influence of facial emotion and sex cues on ratings, and moreover for larger implicit (task-irrelevant) effects of stimulus' emotion than of sex. These findings were replicated and extended in two preregistered studies-one laboratory categorization study using the same face stimuli (N = 108; https://osf.io/ve9an), and one online study with vocalizations (N = 72; https://osf.io/vhc9g). Overall, results show that the associations of maleness-anger and femaleness-happiness exist across sensory modalities, and suggest that emotions expressed in the face and voice cannot be entirely disregarded, even when attention is mainly focused on determining stimulus' sex. We discuss the relevance of these findings for cognitive and neural models of face and voice processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Volunteers' concerns about facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation.

Facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) is the application of an electrical current to the skin to induce muscle contractions and has enormous potential for basic research and clinical intervention in psychology and neuroscience. Because the technique remains largely unknown, and the prospect of receiving electricity to the face can be daunting, willingness to receive facial NMES is likely to be low and gender differences might exist in the amount of concern for the sensation of pain and skin burns. We investigated these questions in 182 healthy participants. The likelihood of taking part (LOTP) in a hypothetical facial NMES study was measured both before and after presenting a detailed vignette about facial NMES including its risks. Results showed that LOTP was generally high and that participants remained more likely to participate than not to, despite a decrease in LOTP after the detailed vignette. LOTP was significantly predicted by participants' previous knowledge about electrical stimulation and their tendency not to worry about the sensations of pain, and it was inversely related to concerns for burns and loss of muscle control. Fear of pain was also inversely related to LOTP, but its effect was mediated by the other concerns. We conclude that willingness to receive facial NMES is generally high across individuals in the studied age range (18-45) and that it is particularly important to reassure participants about facial NMES safety regarding burns and loss of muscle control. The findings are relevant for scholars considering using facial NMES in the laboratory.

Anticipatory and Consummatory Responses to Touch and Food Rewards: A Protocol for Human Research.

Understanding the neural basis of reward processing is a major concern, as it holds the key to alleviating symptoms of addiction and poor mental health. However, this goal seems difficult to attain as long as research on reward processing cannot easily be compared across species and reward types, due to methodological differences and the presence of confounding factors. We recently developed an experimental paradigm that allows monitoring anticipatory and consummatory responses to matched social (touch) and nonsocial (food) rewards in adult humans. The following protocol describes in detail the materials and the paradigm, which measures reward wanting and liking with a real effort task and subjective ratings. It can also be used in combination with facial electromyography (EMG), brain imaging (e.g., fMRI), and pharmacological interventions. It is our firm belief that the field will profit greatly from more research being conducted on reward processing using this and similarly controlled paradigms, which allow for cross-species comparison.

Effects of the mu-opioid receptor agonist morphine on facial mimicry and emotion recognition.

Facial mimicry and emotion recognition are two socio-cognitive abilities involved in adaptive socio-emotional behavior, promoting affiliation and the establishment of social bonds. The mu-opioid receptor (MOR) system plays a key role in affiliation and social bonding. However, it remains unclear whether MORs are involved in the categorization and spontaneous mimicry of emotional facial expressions. Using a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, between-subjects design, we investigated in 82 healthy female volunteers the effects of the specific MOR agonist morphine on the recognition accuracy of emotional faces (happiness, anger, fear), and on their facial mimicry (measured with electromyography). Frequentist statistics did not reveal any significant effects of drug administration on facial mimicry or emotion recognition abilities. However, post hoc Bayesian analyses provided support for an effect of morphine on facial mimicry of fearful facial expressions. Specifically, compared to placebo, morphine reduced mimicry of fear, as shown by lower activity of the frontalis muscle. Bayesian analyses also provided support for the absence of a drug effect on mimicry of happy and angry facial expressions, which were assessed with the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii muscles, as well as on emotion recognition accuracy. These findings suggest that MOR activity is involved in automatic facial responses to fearful stimuli, but not in their identification. Overall, the current results, together with the previously reported small effects of opioid compounds, suggest a relatively marginal role of the MOR system in emotion simulation and perception.

Emotion perception bias associated with the hijab in Austrian and Turkish participants.

In a cross-cultural study, we investigated the link between explicit attitudes towards the hijab and implicit measures of cultural and religious bias during the recognition of emotions. Participants tested in Austria (N = 71) and in Turkey (N = 70) reported their attitude towards the hijab, and categorised in a mousetracker task happy and sad faces of women, shown with five levels of intensity, and framed either by a hijab or by an oval-shaped mask. The two samples did not differ in their explicit attitudes towards the hijab. However, negative attitude towards the hijab predicted greater sadness attribution to happy faces with the hijab in Austrian participants. Unrelated to their explicit attitudes, Turkish participants attributed more sadness to happy faces with than without the hijab. Results suggest that the sight of the hijab activated, in both Austrian and Turkish participants, implicit biases resulting in associations with sadness and negative emotions.

Effects of dopamine D2/3 and opioid receptor antagonism on the trade-off between model-based and model-free behaviour in healthy volunteers.

Human behaviour requires flexible arbitration between actions we do out of habit and actions that are directed towards a specific goal. Drugs that target opioid and dopamine receptors are notorious for inducing maladaptive habitual drug consumption; yet, how the opioidergic and dopaminergic neurotransmitter systems contribute to the arbitration between habitual and goal-directed behaviour is poorly understood. By combining pharmacological challenges with a well-established decision-making task and a novel computational model, we show that the administration of the dopamine D2/3 receptor antagonist amisulpride led to an increase in goal-directed or 'model-based' relative to habitual or 'model-free' behaviour, whereas the non-selective opioid receptor antagonist naltrexone had no appreciable effect. The effect of amisulpride on model-based/model-free behaviour did not scale with drug serum levels in the blood. Furthermore, participants with higher amisulpride serum levels showed higher explorative behaviour. These findings highlight the distinct functional contributions of dopamine and opioid receptors to goal-directed and habitual behaviour and support the notion that even small doses of amisulpride promote flexible application of cognitive control.

How culturally unique are pandemic effects? Evaluating cultural similarities and differences in effects of age, biological sex, and political beliefs on COVID impacts.

Despite being bio-epidemiological phenomena, the causes and effects of pandemics are culturally influenced in ways that go beyond national boundaries. However, they are often studied in isolated pockets, and this fact makes it difficult to parse the unique influence of specific cultural psychologies. To help fill in this gap, the present study applies existing cultural theories via linear mixed modeling to test the influence of unique cultural factors in a multi-national sample (that moves beyond Western nations) on the effects of age, biological sex, and political beliefs on pandemic outcomes that include adverse financial impacts, adverse resource impacts, adverse psychological impacts, and the health impacts of COVID. Our study spanned 19 nations (participant N = 14,133) and involved translations into 9 languages. Linear mixed models revealed similarities across cultures, with both young persons and women reporting worse outcomes from COVID across the multi-national sample. However, these effects were generally qualified by culture-specific variance, and overall more evidence emerged for effects unique to each culture than effects similar across cultures. Follow-up analyses suggested this cultural variability was consistent with models of pre-existing inequalities and socioecological stressors exacerbating the effects of the pandemic. Collectively, this evidence highlights the importance of developing culturally flexible models for understanding the cross-cultural nature of pandemic psychology beyond typical WEIRD approaches.

Large Gatherings? No, Thank You. Devaluation of Crowded Social Scenes During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In most European countries, the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (spring 2020) led to the imposition of physical distancing rules, resulting in a drastic and sudden reduction of real-life social interactions. Even people not directly affected by the virus itself were impacted in their physical and/or mental health, as well as in their financial security, by governmental lockdown measures. We investigated whether the combination of these events had changed people's appraisal of social scenes by testing 241 participants recruited mainly in Italy, Austria, and Germany in an online, preregistered study conducted about 50 days after the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe. Images depicting individuals alone, in small groups (up to four people), and in large groups (more than seven people) were rated in terms of valence, arousal, and perceived physical distance. Pre-pandemic normative ratings were obtained from a validated database (OASIS). Several self-report measures were also taken, and condensed into four factors through factor analysis. All images were rated as more arousing compared to the pre-pandemic period, and the greater the decrease in real-life physical interactions reported by participants, the higher the ratings of arousal. As expected, only images depicting large gatherings of people were rated less positively during, compared to before, the pandemic. These ratings of valence were, however, moderated by a factor that included participants' number of days in isolation, relationship closeness, and perceived COVID-19 threat. Higher scores on this factor were associated with more positive ratings of images of individuals alone and in small groups, suggesting an increased appreciation of safer social situations, such as intimate and small-group contacts. The same factor was inversely related to the perceived physical distance between individuals in images of small and large groups, suggesting an impact of lockdown measures and contagion-related worries on the representation of interpersonal space. These findings point to rapid and compelling psychological and social consequences of the lockdown measures imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic on the perception of social groups. Further studies should assess the long-term impact of such events as typical everyday life is restored.