Autonomic and facial electromyographic responses to watching eyes.

We measured participants' psychophysiological responses and gaze behavior while viewing a stimulus person's direct and averted gaze in three different conditions manipulating the participants' experience of being watched. The results showed that skin conductance responses and heart rate deceleration responses were greater to direct than averted gaze only in the condition in which the participants had the experience of being watched by the other individual. In contrast, gaze direction had no effects on these responses when the participants were manipulated to believe that the other individual could not watch them or when the stimulus person was presented in a pre-recorded video. Importantly, the eye tracking measures showed no differences in participants' looking behavior between these stimulus presentation conditions. The results of facial electromyography responses suggested that direct gaze elicited greater zygomatic and periocular responses than averted gaze did, independent of the presentation condition. It was concluded that the affective arousal and attention-orienting indexing autonomic responses to eye contact are driven by the experience of being watched. In contrast, the facial responses seem to reflect automatized affiliative responses which can be elicited even in conditions in which seeing another's direct gaze does not signal that the self is being watched.

The pictorial set of Emotional Social Interactive Scenarios between Chinese Adults (ESISCA): Development and validation.

Affective picture databases with a single facial expression or body posture in one image have been widely applied to investigate emotion. However, to date, there was no standardized database containing the stimuli which involve multiple emotional signals in social interactive scenarios. The current study thus developed a pictorial set comprising 274 images depicting two Chinese adults' interactive scenarios conveying emotions of happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and neutral. The data of the valence and arousal ratings of the scenes and the emotional categories of the scenes and the faces in the images were provided in the present study. Analyses of the data collected from 70 undergraduate students suggested high reliabilities of the valence and arousal ratings of the scenes and high judgmental agreements in categorizing the scene and facial emotions. The findings suggested that the present dataset is well constructed and could be useful for future studies to investigate the emotion recognition or empathy in social interactions in both healthy and clinical (e.g., ASD) populations.

Emotionally positive self-directed speech widens the cone of gaze.

The perception of another individual's gaze direction is not a low-level, stimulus-driven visual process but a higher-level process that can be top-down modulated, for example, by emotion and theory of mind. The present study investigated the influence of directed (self vs. other) and emotional (positive vs. negative) speech on judging whether another individual's gaze or an arrow is directed toward the self or not. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that participants perceived a wider range of gaze deviations as looking at them when the speech was directed to themselves versus others. Importantly, the emotion in speech also impacted gaze judgments, but only when the speech was related to the participants themselves: the gaze cone was greater for positive than for negative self-relevant speech. This pattern of results was observed regardless of whether the speech was task-relevant (Experiment 1) or task-irrelevant (Experiment 2). Additionally, the results from Experiment 3 showed that the directed and emotional information in the speech had no impact on the judgments of the direction of an arrow. These findings expand our knowledge of the interaction between the perception of emotions and gaze direction and emphasize the significance of self-relevance in modulating this interaction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Attentional biases toward auditory weight-related information among females with weight dissatisfaction.

Although there is substantial evidence of visual attentional biases in processing weight-related information among individuals with weight dissatisfaction, few studies have examined auditory attentional biases in these individuals. The identification of attentional biases may provide an impetus for interventions to reduce distress, negative body image, and pathological eating patterns among weight-dissatisfied individuals. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the attentional biases, as well as the neural consequences, toward auditory weight-related information among weight-dissatisfied young females. In this experiment, young female participants were assigned to an experimental group with high weight dissatisfaction (HWD) and a control group with low weight dissatisfaction (LWD) according to the levels of weight dissatisfaction. Using a spatial cueing paradigm, auditory fatness-related, thinness-related, and neutral household words were presented laterally as cue stimuli, followed by visual stimuli presented at either the cued or uncued location. The results revealed that auditory fatness-related words elicited significantly larger N2ac amplitudes than auditory thinness-related and neutral words in the HWD group. However, for the LWD group, thinness-related words elicited a significantly larger N2ac than fatness-related and neutral words. These results suggest an orienting attentional bias toward auditory fatness-related body words among females with HWD and an orienting attentional bias toward auditory thinness-related words among females with LWD.

Audiovisual illusion training improves multisensory temporal integration.

When we perceive external physical stimuli from the environment, the brain must remain somewhat flexible to unaligned stimuli within a specific range, as multisensory signals are subject to different transmission and processing delays. Recent studies have shown that the width of the 'temporal binding window (TBW)' can be reduced by perceptual learning. However, to date, the vast majority of studies examining the mechanisms of perceptual learning have focused on experience-dependent effects, failing to reach a consensus on its relationship with the underlying perception influenced by audiovisual illusion. The sound-induced flash illusion (SiFI) training is a reliable function for improving perceptual sensitivity. The present study utilized the classic auditory-dominated SiFI paradigm with feedback training to investigate the effect of a 5-day SiFI training on multisensory temporal integration, as evaluated by a simultaneity judgment (SJ) task and temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. We demonstrate that audiovisual illusion training enhances multisensory temporal integration precision in the form of (i) the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) shifts to reality (0 ms) and (ii) a narrowing TBW. The results are consistent with a Bayesian model of causal inference, suggesting that perception learning reduce the susceptibility to SiFI, whilst improving the precision of audiovisual temporal estimation.

Skin conductance, facial EMG, and heart rate responses in multi-person gaze interactions.

Previous literature has reported enhanced affective and attentional responses to faces with a direct vs. averted gaze. Typically, in these studies, only single faces were presented. However, daily social encounters often involve interaction with more than just one person. By employing an experimental set-up in which the participants believed they were interacting with two other persons, the present study, for the first time, investigated participants' skin conductance, facial electromyographic (EMG), and heart rate deceleration responses in multi-person eye contact situations. Responses were measured in two different social contexts; i) when the participants observed eye contact between two other persons ('vicarious eye contact effect'), and ii) when the participants themselves received direct gaze either from one or two persons. The results showed that the skin conductance, facial EMG, and heart rate deceleration responses elicited by observing two other persons making eye contact did not differ from those elicited by observing one person looking at the other while the other person was not reciprocating with their gaze. As a novel finding, the results showed that receiving direct gaze from two persons elicited greater affective arousal and zygomatic EMG, but smaller heart rate deceleration responses in participants than receiving direct gaze from one person only. The findings are thoroughly discussed and it is concluded that physiological responses in multi-person interaction contexts are influenced by many social effects between the interactors and can be markedly different from those observed in two-person interactions.

Spatial attentional biases toward height-related words in young males with physical stature dissatisfaction.

By recording event-related potentials (ERPs) during a dot-probe task, the present study examined the neural dynamics of attentional bias toward height-related words among height dissatisfied males. Sixty male participants screened by Negative Physical Self Scale-Stature Concerns subscale (NPS-S) were assigned into a high height dissatisfaction (HHD) group and a low height dissatisfaction (LHD) group. The results showed that tall-related versus neutral words elicited larger N2pc for both HHD and LHD groups, whereas short-related versus neutral words elicited larger N2pc only for the HHD group. Additionally, an evident Pd was elicited by tall-related words for the HHD group, but not for the LHD group. Taken together, these findings revealed attentional biases toward height-related information for HHD individuals on a neural level. Specifically, HHD individuals showed an enhanced spatial attention oriented toward both tall-related and short-related words, and then, the allocated attention to the tall-related words was terminated by an active suppression mechanism.

Om chanting modulates the processing of negative stimuli: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

Previous studies have suggested that Om chanting, a type of meditation, can relieve individuals' negative emotions. However, the dynamic aspects of neural processes in the processing of the negative stimuli while Om chanting are still unclear. In this study, we recruited 33 healthy undergraduate students without meditation experience and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to unpleasant and neutral images when they performed Om chanting and viewing task. The behavioral results showed that the unpleasant images were rated as less unpleasant and arousing in the condition of Om chanting than while passive viewing, and the rates were not different between the two conditions for the neutral images. Analyses of the ERP responses to the emotional stimuli revealed that Om chanting decreased P1 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes for the neutral images but not for the unpleasant images. We speculated that Om chanting might reduce vigilance to the neutral stimuli, whereas for the negative stimuli, they automatically captured all available attentional resources and led to a failure in observing the regulating effect of Om chanting. These observations suggest that Om chanting modulates individuals' affective evaluations to the negative stimuli and alters early visual and late neural processing of the stimuli.

Early integration of affectively contextual information when processing low-intensity fearful faces: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

In daily social situations, faces rarely appear in isolation and are often contextual. This study investigated individuals' behavioral and neural responses to facial expressions with different intensities embedded in emotional scenes. Participants were presented with neutral, low-intensity, and prototypical fearful expressions embedded in positive and negative scenes and instructed to categorize the facial expressions as neutral or fearful. The behavioral results showed that neutral and low-intensity fearful expressions embedded in negative scenes were rated as fearful significantly more frequently than the same faces embedded in positive scenes. Event-related potential analyses revealed the time course of the integration of contextual information when processing facial expressions. N170 modulation by scene valence was found for low-intensity and prototypical fearful expressions, showing greater N170 elicited by negative than positive scenes. The results suggest that affective information extracted from contextual scenes influences the processing of facial emotions in the early perceptual encoding stage. Furthermore, the pattern of effect varies for different intensities of expressions.

Auditory attentional biases in young males with physical stature dissatisfaction.

The attentional biases toward body-related information for individuals with weight concerns and eating disorders have been well documented. However, our knowledge of the attentional biases toward body-related information for subjects with physical stature concerns is only at the beginning. And the research on the auditory attentional biases for individuals with physical stature concerns is rare. The identification of attentional biases may provide an impetus for interventions to reduce distress among height dissatisfied individuals. Therefore, the present study investigated the neural mechanisms of attentional bias toward auditory physical stature-related words among height dissatisfied young males by using event-related potential recordings. Forty-four young male participants screened by Negative Physical Self Scale-Stature Concerns subscale (NPS-S) were assigned into an experimental group with high levels of height dissatisfaction (HHD) and a control group with low levels of height dissatisfaction (LHD). Task irrelevant auditory tall-related words, short-related words and neutral words were presented unilaterally to the participants as the cue in a cue-target paradigm. Participants were required to respond to the visual target preceded by the task-irrelevant auditory cue. The results found that significantly larger N2ac was elicited by tall-related words than short-related words and neutral words only for the HHD group, but not for the LHD group. LPCpc amplitudes did not differ significantly by the functions of word types and experimental groups. These results suggest an attentional orienting bias toward auditory tall-related words for young males with high levels of height dissatisfaction.

Temporal dynamics of the flash-induced bouncing effect.

Two identical visual disks moving toward each other on a two-dimensional (2D) display are more likely to be perceived as "streaming through" than "bouncing off" each other after their coincidence. However, either a brief auditory tone or visual flash presented at the coincident moment of the disks can strikingly increase the incidence of the bouncing percept. Despite the neural substrates underlying the sound-induced bouncing effect have been widely investigated, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying the flash-induced bouncing effect. The present study used event-related potential recordings to explore the temporal dynamics of the flash-induced bouncing effect. The results showed that the amplitude of the postcoincidence parietooccipital P2 component (190-230 ms after coincidence) elicited by the visual motion was significantly smaller on bouncing relative to streaming trials only when the flash was presented but not when absent. In addition, the parietal P3 component (330-430 ms) was found to be larger on bouncing than streaming trials when the flash was presented, but the opposite was true when no flash was presented. These electrophysiological findings suggest that the flash-induced bouncing effect may occur at both perceptual and postperceptual stages of processing.

Modulation of the eyeblink and cardiac startle reflexes by genuine eye contact.

Is another person's direct gaze an inherently positive or negative stimulus? The present study employed the startle reflex methodology to investigate individuals' automatic reactions to another person's direct and averted gaze. In the study, participants' eyeblink startle and cardiac reflexes elicited by a high-intensity acoustic noise stimulus were measured in the context of viewing a live model's direct and downward gaze. Both the eyeblink electromyographic and electrocardiographic data revealed that the startle reflex was modulated by gaze direction. Direct gaze attenuated the eyeblink startle and cardiac reflexes to the acoustic probes compared to those elicited in the context of a downward gaze. These results indicate that the defense reflex is weaker when presented in the context of direct versus downward gaze, and thus suggest that another individual's direct gaze, compared to averted gaze, automatically elicits more positive affective responses in the viewer.

Eye Contact Judgment Is Influenced by Perceivers' Social Anxiety But Not by Their Affective State.

Fast and accurate judgment of whether another person is making eye contact or not is crucial for our social interaction. As affective states have been shown to influence social perceptions and judgments, we investigated the influence of observers' own affective states and trait anxiety on their eye contact judgments. In two experiments, participants were required to judge whether animated faces (Experiment 1) and real faces (Experiment 2) with varying gaze angles were looking at them or not. Participants performed the task in pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant odor conditions. The results from two experiments showed that eye contact judgments were not modulated by observers' affective state, yet participants with higher levels of social anxiety accepted a wider range of gaze deviations from the direct gaze as eye contact. We conclude that gaze direction judgments depend on individual differences in affective predispositions, yet they are not amenable to situational affective influences.

Affect in the eyes: explicit and implicit evaluations.

The present study investigated whether another individual's gaze direction influences an observer's affective responses. In Experiment 1, subjective self-ratings and an affective priming paradigm were employed to examine how participants explicitly and implicitly, respectively, evaluated the affective valence of direct gaze, averted gaze, and closed eyes. The explicit self-ratings showed that participants evaluated closed eyes more positively than direct gaze. However, the implicit priming task showed an inverse pattern of results indicating that direct gaze was automatically evaluated more positively than closed eyes were. Experiment 2 confirmed that the opposite patterns of results between the two tasks were not due to differences in presentation times of the gaze stimuli. The results provide evidence for automatic affective reactions to eye gaze and indicate a dissociation between explicit and implicit affective evaluations of eyes and gaze direction.

Affective Priming by Eye Gaze Stimuli: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence.

The present study employed the affective priming paradigm and measurements of event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate implicit affective reactions elicited by gaze stimuli. Participants categorized positive and negative words primed by direct gaze, averted gaze and closed eyes. The behavioral response time (RT) results indicated that direct gaze implicitly elicited more positive affective reactions than did closed eyes. Analyses of the ERP responses to the target words revealed a priming effect on the N170 and an interaction on late positive potential (LPP) responses, and congruently with the behavioral results, suggested that, compared to closed eyes, direct gaze was affectively more congruent with positive words and more incongruent with negative words. The priming effect on the N170 response indicated that gaze stimuli influenced the subsequent affective word processing at an early stage of information processing. In conclusion, the present behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests that direct gaze automatically activates more positive affective reactions than closed eyes.

Combined Cognitive Training vs. Memory Strategy Training in Healthy Older Adults.

UNLABELLED: As mnemonic utilization deficit in older adults associates with age-related decline in executive function, we hypothesized that memory strategy training combined with executive function training might induce larger training effect in memory and broader training effects in non-memory outcomes than pure memory training. The present study compared the effects of combined cognitive training (executive function training plus memory strategy training) to pure memory strategy training. Forty healthy older adults were randomly assigned to a combined cognitive training group or a memory strategy training group. A control group receiving no training was also included. Combined cognitive training group received 16 sessions of training (eight sessions of executive function training followed by eight sessions of memory strategy training). Memory training group received 16 sessions of memory strategy training. The results partly supported our hypothesis in that indeed improved performance on executive function was only found in combined training group, whereas memory performance increased less in combined training compared to memory strategy group. Results suggest that combined cognitive training may be less efficient than pure memory training in memory outcomes, though the influences from insufficient training time and less closeness between trained executive function and working memory could not be excluded; however it has broader training effects in non-memory outcomes. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: www.chictr.org.cn, identifier ChiCTR-OON-16007793.

Interpretive bias of ambiguous facial expressions in older adults with depressive symptoms.

Cognitive theories of emotional disorders indicate that biases in cognitive processes, such as attention, memory, and interpretation, are common factors that indicate vulnerability to these disorders, although their form varies according to the type of disorder. However, most of the studies have focused on adolescence and adulthood. It is still uncertain whether cognitive biases are risk factors for late-life depression. The present study sought to explore the role of interpretive bias in older adults with depressive symptoms and whether this effect is independent of basic cognitive abilities. Therefore, 18 older adults with depressive symptoms and 21 healthy controls were compared with an ambiguous facial expression identification task, a Mini Mental Status Examination, a Trail Making Test A and B, and a Word Fluency Test. Findings revealed that the depressive group was more likely to identify more ambiguous happy-sad facial expressions as indicative of sadness than were the healthy controls, but the two groups showed no significant differences in the cognitive test scores. These results suggest that interpretive bias indicates vulnerability to late-life depression, but basic cognitive abilities may have no influence in this context.

The effects of reminiscence therapy on depressive symptoms of Chinese elderly: study protocol of a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Depression is one of the most common mental disorders with a high prevalence among the older adults. In recent years, after realizing some side effects of the antidepressants, non-pharmacological psychological treatments begin to attract accruing attention. Reminiscence therapy is one of the psychological treatments that specially designed for the elderly to improve their mental health status by recalling and assessing their existing memory. Though some studies indicate reminiscence therapy can be effective and beneficial for the mental health of elderly, the conclusions are not consistent yet. The aim of this research is to assess the effectiveness of reminiscence therapy for Chinese elderly. METHODS: Sixty older adults (≥60 years of age) with mild to moderate depression will be randomly assigned to an experimental or a control condition. The participants in the experiment group will receive the reminiscence therapy under the Watt's protocol with adaptation to Chinese Culture which consists of six weekly sessions of 90 minutes each. The control group will be treated as before. An assessor who is blind to intervention will conduct the measures before treatment, after treatment immediately, and three months after treatment. DISCUSSION: This study will provide the evidence whether the reminiscence therapy is effective to treat depressive symptoms of Chinese elderly. This research has been registered in the clinicaltrials.gov (NCT01553669).