Threat priming diminishes the gaze cueing effect.

Gaze cueing effect (GCE) refers to attention orienting towards the gazed-at location, characterised by faster responses to gazed-at than non-gazed-at stimuli. A previous study investigated the effects of affective priming on GCE and reported that threatening primes enhanced GCE. However, it remains unknown whether the threat or heightened arousal potentiated GCE. We investigated how highly arousing threatening and positive primes, compared to low arousing neutral primes modulate GCE. After a brief exposure to an affective prime (pictures of threat or erotica) or a neutral prime, participants detected an asterisk validly or invalidly cued by the gaze direction of a neutral face. The results showed that the threatening primes diminished the magnitude of GCE. The highly arousing positive primes did not have an effect on GCE. Further analyses showed that, as compared to neutral priming, the reaction times after threatening primes were shortened on invalid trials. This finding was interpreted to suggest that the threatening primes enhanced goal-directed target detection and attenuated attention orienting by irrelevant gaze cues via improving executive control. In sum, the present findings indicate that threat priming modulates GCE, not because of heightened arousal but because of the threat.

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.

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).

Psychophysiological responses to eye contact with a humanoid robot: Impact of perceived intentionality.

Eye contact with a social robot has been shown to elicit similar psychophysiological responses to eye contact with another human. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the attention- and affect-related psychophysiological responses differentiate between direct (toward the observer) and averted gaze mainly when viewing embodied faces that are capable of social interaction, whereas pictorial or pre-recorded stimuli have no such capability. It has been suggested that genuine eye contact, as indicated by the differential psychophysiological responses to direct and averted gaze, requires a feeling of being watched by another mind. Therefore, we measured event-related potentials (N170 and frontal P300) with EEG, facial electromyography, skin conductance, and heart rate deceleration responses to seeing a humanoid robot's direct versus averted gaze, while manipulating the impression of the robot's intentionality. The results showed that the N170 and the facial zygomatic responses were greater to direct than to averted gaze of the robot, and independent of the robot's intentionality, whereas the frontal P300 responses were more positive to direct than to averted gaze only when the robot appeared intentional. The study provides further evidence that the gaze behavior of a social robot elicits attentional and affective responses and adds that the robot's seemingly autonomous social behavior plays an important role in eliciting higher-level socio-cognitive processing.

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.

Perception of eye contact, self-referential thinking and age.

Increased thinking about one's self has been proposed to widen the gaze cone, that is, the range of gaze deviations that an observer judges as looking directly at them (eye contact). This study investigated the effects of a self-referential thinking manipulation and demographic factors on the gaze cone. In a preregistered experiment (N = 200), the self-referential thinking manipulation, as compared to a control manipulation, did not influence the gaze cone, or the use of first-person pronouns in a manipulation check measuring self-referential processing. This may indicate a failure of the manipulation and participants' lack of effort. However, participants' age was significantly correlated with both measures: older people had wider gaze cones and used more self-referring pronouns. A second experiment (N = 300) further examined the effect of the manipulation and demographic factors on self-referential processing, and the results were replicated. These findings may reflect age-related self-reference and positivity effects.

Being watched by a humanoid robot and a human: Effects on affect-related psychophysiological responses.

Eye contact with a humanoid robot has been shown to evoke similar affect and affiliation related psychophysiological responses as eye contact with another human. In this pre-registered study, we investigated whether these effects are dependent on the experience of being "watched". Psychophysiological responses (SCR, zygomatic and corrugator facial EMG, frontal EEG asymmetry) to a humanoid robot's or a human model's direct vs. averted gaze were measured while manipulating the participants' belief of whether the robot/human model could see them or not. The results showed greater autonomic arousal responses and facial responses related to positive affect both to the robot's and the human model's direct vs. averted gaze, regardless of the belief condition. The belief condition influenced the overall magnitude of these responses to both stimulus models, however, to a lesser extent for the robot than for the human model. For the frontal EEG asymmetry, the effect of gaze direction was non-significant in both belief conditions. The results lend further support for the importance of eye contact in human-robot interaction and provide insights into people's implicit attributions of humanoid robots' mental capacities.

The influence of role awareness, empathy induction and trait empathy on dictator game giving.

We ask how state empathy, trait empathy, and role awareness influence dictator game giving in a monetarily incentivized experiment. We manipulated two factors: role awareness (role certainty vs. role uncertainty) and state empathy induction (no empathy induction vs. empathy induction). Under role uncertainty, participants did not know their role as a dictator or a recipient when making their choices. State empathy was induced by asking the dictators to consider what the recipient would feel when learning about the decision. Each participant was randomly assigned into one of the four conditions, and in each condition, participants were randomly assigned into dictator and receiver roles. The role assignment took place before or after decisions were made, depending on the condition. We also studied the direct influence of trait empathy on dictator game giving as well as its interaction with the experimental manipulations. Trait empathy was measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) before the experiment. Of our experimental manipulations, role awareness had an effect on dictator game giving; participants donated more under role uncertainty than under role certainty. Instead, we did not observe an effect of state empathy induction. Of trait empathy subscales, only affective empathy was positively associated with dictator game giving. Finally, role awareness did not influence all participants similarly but had a larger impact on those with low scores on trait empathic concern or trait affective empathy. Our results indicate that specific measures to induce altruistic sharing can be effective but their effect may vary depending on certain personal characteristics.

Attentional bias towards interpersonal aggression in depression - an eye movement study.

Depressed individuals exhibit an attentional bias towards mood-congruent stimuli, yet evidence for biased processing of threat-related information in human interaction remains scarce. Here, we tested whether an attentional bias towards interpersonally aggressive pictures over interpersonally neutral pictures could be observed to a greater extent in depressed participants than in control participants. Eye movements were recorded while the participants freely viewed visually matched interpersonally aggressive and neutral pictures, which were presented in pairs. Across the groups, participants spent more time looking at neutral pictures than at aggressive pictures, probably reflecting avoidance behavior. When the participants could anticipate the stimulus valence, depressed participants - but not controls - showed an early attentional bias towards interpersonally aggressive pictures, as indexed by their longer first fixation durations on aggressive pictures than on neutral pictures. Our results thus preliminarily suggest both an early attentional bias towards interpersonal aggression, which is present, in depressed participants, also when aggression contents are anticipated, and a later attentional avoidance of aggression. The early depression-related bias in information processing may have maladaptive effects on the way depressed individuals perceive and function in social interaction and can, therefore, maintain depressed mood.

Making eye contact with a robot: Psychophysiological responses to eye contact with a human and with a humanoid robot.

Previous research has shown that eye contact, in human-human interaction, elicits increased affective and attention related psychophysiological responses. In the present study, we investigated whether eye contact with a humanoid robot would elicit these responses. Participants were facing a humanoid robot (NAO) or a human partner, both physically present and looking at or away from the participant. The results showed that both in human-robot and human-human condition, eye contact versus averted gaze elicited greater skin conductance responses indexing autonomic arousal, greater facial zygomatic muscle responses (and smaller corrugator responses) associated with positive affect, and greater heart deceleration responses indexing attention allocation. With regard to the skin conductance and zygomatic responses, the human model's gaze direction had a greater effect on the responses as compared to the robot's gaze direction. In conclusion, eye contact elicits automatic affective and attentional reactions both when shared with a humanoid robot and with another human.

Psychophysiological responses to eye contact in a live interaction and in video call.

Another person's gaze directed to oneself elicits autonomic arousal and facial reactions indicating positive affect in its observer. These effects have only been found to occur with mutual, live eye contact and not in response to direct gaze pictures or when the observer believes that the live person cannot see them. The question remains whether the physical presence of the other person is necessary for these effects. We measured psychophysiological responses to another person's direct versus averted gaze in three conditions: live interaction, bidirectional video call, and watching a mere video. Autonomic arousal was measured with skin conductance responses and facial reactions with facial electromyography. In the live and video call conditions, but not in the mere video condition, direct gaze increased autonomic arousal in comparison to averted gaze. In all three conditions, however, direct gaze elicited positive affective facial reactions. Therefore, an experience of being seen is essential for the autonomic reactions but not for the facial responses that are elicited by another person's direct gaze. Most importantly, the results suggest that the physical presence or proximity of the other person is not necessary for these psychophysiological responses to eye contact.

Bodily maps of emotions are culturally universal.

Emotions are often felt in the body, and interoceptive feedback is an important component of conscious emotional experiences. Here, we provide support for the cultural universality of bodily sensations associated with 13 emotions in a large international sample (3,954 individuals from 101 countries; age range = 18-90). Participants were presented with 2 silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words and asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while they experienced each given emotion. We tested the effects of various background factors (i.e., age, sex, education, body mass index, nationality, civilization, and language) on the bodily sensation maps. Bodily sensations associated with emotions were concordant across the tested cultures (rs > 0.82) and across the sexes (r > 0.80). Bodily sensations weakened during aging (M rs = 0.11 across emotions). We conclude that universality in experiencing emotions in the body is stronger than the differences due to culture or sex. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Social inclusion, but not exclusion, delays attentional disengagement from direct gaze.

The present study investigated whether another person's direct gaze holds a perceiver's visuospatial attention and whether social exclusion or social inclusion would enhance this effect. Participants were socially excluded, socially included, or underwent a non-social control manipulation in a virtual ball-tossing game. The manipulation was followed by an attentional disengagement task, in which we measured manual response times in identification of peripheral stimuli shown to the left or right of centrally presented faces portraying direct or downward gaze. Contrary to our hypotheses, the response times were not, in general, longer for direct gaze trials than downward gaze trials, and exclusion did not increase the delay in direct gaze trials. Instead, we discovered that, in the social inclusion group, the response times were longer for direct gaze trials relative to downward gaze trials. Thus, social inclusion might have activated affiliation-related cognitive processes leading to delayed attentional disengagement from faces cueing affiliation.

I don't need your attention: ostracism can narrow the cone of gaze.

Previous research has shown that ostracized participants seek inclusive cues, such as gaze directed at them, when trying to reaffiliate. However, instead of seeking reinclusion, ostracized individuals may sometimes withdraw from interactions if not offered an opportunity for reaffiliation. In the current study, after an ostracism manipulation with no reaffiliation opportunity, participants judged whether faces portraying direct gaze or slightly averted gaze (2°-8° to the left and to the right) were looking at them or not. Compared to an inclusion group and a non-social control group, ostracized participants accepted a smaller range of gaze directions as being directed at them, i.e., they had a narrower "cone of gaze". The width of the gaze cone was equally wide in the inclusion and control groups. We propose that, without an opportunity for reaffiliation, ostracized participants may start to view other people as particularly unapproachable, possibly indicative of a motivational tendency to disengage from interactions.

The effect of being watched on facial EMG and autonomic activity in response to another individual's facial expressions.

We tested if facial reactions to another person's facial expressions depend on the self-relevance of the observed expressions. In the present study (n = 44), we measured facial electromyographic (zygomatic and corrugator) activity and autonomic arousal (skin conductance) responses to a live model's smiling and neutral faces. In one condition, the participant and the model were able to see each other normally, whereas in the other condition, the participant was led to believe that the model could not see the participant. The results showed that the increment of zygomatic activity in response to smiling faces versus neutral faces was greater when the participants believed they were being watched than it was when the participants believed they were not being watched. However, zygomatic responses to smiles did not differ between the conditions, while the results suggested that the participants' zygomatic responses to neutral faces seemed to attenuate in the condition of believing they were being watched. Autonomic responses to smiling faces were greater in the belief of being watched than in the belief of not being watched condition. The results suggest that the self-relevance of another individual's facial expression modulates autonomic arousal responses and to a lesser extent facial EMG responses.

Atypical Pattern of Frontal EEG Asymmetry for Direct Gaze in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This study examined approach-motivation related brain activity (frontal electroencephalogram [EEG] asymmetry) in response to direct and averted gaze in 3- to 6-year-old typically developing (TD) children, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and those with intellectual disability (ID). We found that, in TD children, direct gaze elicited greater approach-related frontal EEG activity than did downcast gaze. This pattern of activity was in contrast to that observed in children with ASD, who showed greater approach-related activity in response to downcast gaze than to direct gaze. ID children did not differ in their responses to different gaze conditions. These findings indicate that another person's direct gaze does not elicit approach-motivation related brain activity in young children with ASD.

The effects of social exclusion on processing of social information - A cognitive psychology perspective.

In this article, we review the research investigating the effects of social exclusion on processing of social information. We look into this topic from the point of view of cognitive psychology aiming to provide a systematic description of the effects of exclusion on workings of different cognitive mechanisms involved in social information processing. We focus on four lines of inquiry. First, we present the research on the effects of exclusion on memory for social information. Second, we review studies, which have investigated how exclusion changes the way people view and evaluate their social environment. Third, we look into the research which has investigated whether exclusion modulates early social information processing at the perceptual level. Finally, we discuss the research on the effects of exclusion on attentional processes. Importantly, we also present gaps in our understanding on these issues and provide suggestions as to how future research could provide a more detailed view on how exclusion modulates social information processing.

Eye contact reduces lying.

The perception of watching eyes has been found to reduce dishonest behavior. This effect, however, has only been shown in situations where it can be explained by increased adherence to rules and norms, and thus a watching-eyes effect on dishonesty per se has not been demonstrated. Moreover, the effect has been investigated only with images of watching eyes, not in an interactive situation with a live person, which may arguably have different effects on behavior. In the present study, the effect of watching eyes on dishonesty was investigated with an interactive computer game of lying. Participants played the game against a confederate, whom they believed to be another participant. On each trial, they were briefly presented with a view of the confederate, after which they chose whether to lie in the game. The confederate alternated between the use of direct and downward gaze. The results showed that another individual's direct gaze reduced lying in the game. The findings have implications for both everyday and professional situations, such as clinical conversations and police interrogations.

Affective Eye Contact: An Integrative Review.

In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals' direct gaze has robust effects on various attentional and cognitive processes. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to investigating the affective effects triggered by eye contact. This article reviews research concerning the effects of others' gaze direction on observers' affective responses. The review focuses on studies in which affective reactions have been investigated in well-controlled laboratory experiments, and in which contextual factors possibly influencing perceivers' affects have been controlled. Two important themes emerged from this review. First, explicit affective evaluations of seeing another's direct versus averted gaze have resulted in rather inconsistent findings; some studies report more positive subjective feelings to direct compared to averted gaze, whereas others report the opposite pattern. These contradictory findings may be related, for example, to differences between studies in terms of the capability of direct-gaze stimuli to elicit feelings of self-involvement. Second, studies relying on various implicit measures have reported more consistent results; they indicate that direct gaze increases affective arousal, and more importantly, that eye contact automatically evokes a positively valenced affective reaction. Based on the review, possible psychological mechanisms for the positive affective reactions elicited by eye contact are described.

Maps of subjective feelings.

Subjective feelings are a central feature of human life. We defined the organization and determinants of a feeling space involving 100 core feelings that ranged from cognitive and affective processes to somatic sensations and common illnesses. The feeling space was determined by a combination of basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping, and neuroimaging meta-analysis. A total of 1,026 participants took part in online surveys where we assessed (i) for each feeling, the intensity of four hypothesized basic dimensions (mental experience, bodily sensation, emotion, and controllability), (ii) subjectively experienced similarity of the 100 feelings, and (iii) topography of bodily sensations associated with each feeling. Neural similarity between a subset of the feeling states was derived from the NeuroSynth meta-analysis database based on the data from 9,821 brain-imaging studies. All feelings were emotionally valenced and the saliency of bodily sensations correlated with the saliency of mental experiences associated with each feeling. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction revealed five feeling clusters: positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive processes, somatic states and illnesses, and homeostatic states. Organization of the feeling space was best explained by basic dimensions of emotional valence, mental experiences, and bodily sensations. Subjectively felt similarity of feelings was associated with basic feeling dimensions and the topography of the corresponding bodily sensations. These findings reveal a map of subjective feelings that are categorical, emotional, and embodied.