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Abstract

It has recently been demonstrated that eye contact influences bodily self-awareness. Here, we investigated if the belief of being the target of another person’s attention may also induce such influence. We created videos of an individual wearing two different pairs of sunglasses. We manipulated the participants to believe that they were in on-line connection with the individual and that one of the pairs of sunglasses was obstructed so that the individual could not see them through it. We demonstrated that the perception of an individual wearing see-through sunglasses, as compared to obstructed sunglasses or a low-level baseline condition, led to a greater correlation between the participants’ rating of the intensity of their bodily reactions and their skin conductance response to emotional pictures. This shows that the belief to be watched by another social agent increases bodily self-awareness and further suggests that such belief is embedded in direct gaze perception.

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... To induce variation in participants' emotional experience, we manipulated the arousing power of the images. We also used context pictures pertaining to different levels of social contact at the beginning of each trial to manipulate interoceptive accuracy, since we previously showed that social contact increases interoceptive accuracy (Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem et al., 2017Hazem et al., , 2018. ...
... As a reliable indicator of physiological response intensity (Boucsein, 2012), we recorded participants' skin conductance response (SCR) to the emotional images. We objectively quantified IAc by measuring the correlation between subjective ratings and SCRs (Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem et al., 2017Hazem et al., , 2018. Although there is no sensory system dedicated to perceiving SCRs per se, sympathetic activation leads to several correlated changes (heartbeat changes, pupil dilation, etc.), including SCRs that have been proven to reflect the level of arousal elicited by emotional stimuli and to correlate very well with subjective ratings of emotional reaction intensity (Boucsein, 2012;Lang & Bradley, 2010). ...
... Pictures from the Radboud Faces Database were used for the face stimuli (Langner et al., 2010). Since IAc has been shown to increase with social contact (see also Hazem et al., 2017 andHazem et al., 2018 for replications of the results), we used these context pictures in the present study to induce variations in IAc and favor the investigation of the neural bases of participants' IAc on a trial-by-trial basis (see Supplementary material). ...
Article
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Interoceptive Accuracy (IAc), the precision with which one assesses the signals arising from one’s own body, is receiving increasing attention in the literature. IAc has mainly been approached as an individual trait and has been investigated through the cardiac modality using mostly non ecological methods. Such studies consensually designate the anterior insular cortex as the main brain correlate of IAc. However, there is a lack of brain imaging studies investigating IAc in a broader and more ecological way. Here, we used a novel ecological task in which participants monitored their general bodily reactions to external events and investigated brain regions subtending intra-individual (i.e. trial-by-trial) variations of IAc. At each trial, participants had to rate the intensity of their bodily reactions to an emotional picture. We recorded participants’ skin conductance response (SCR) to the picture as an indicator of actual physiological response intensity. We fitted an fMRI model using, as regressors, the SCR value, the rating, and the product of the two (as a proxy of participants’ IAc) obtained trial per trial. We observed that activity in the dorsomedial pre-frontal cortex (dmPFC) increased when individuals’ IAc decreased. This result reveals general mechanisms of error processing in intra-individual variations of IAc, which are unspecific to interoception. Our result has a practical impact in the clinical domain. Namely, it supports the predictive coding framework whereby IAc deficits may reflect impairments in processing a mismatch between actual interoceptive signals and predictions.
... In the second stage, the belief in being watched embedded in direct gaze will engage self-referential processing and this will increase the sense of self-involvement in the interaction. Consequently, there will be a variety of Watching Eyes effects on behaviour, such as increments in self-relevant memory, self-awareness (Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem, George, Baltazar, & Conty, 2017;Pönkänen, Peltola, & Hietanen, 2011) and prosocial behaviour (Izuma et al., 2011(Izuma et al., , 2009. ...
... They found that, when the first picture showed direct gaze, participants were more accurate in rating the intensity of their physiological signal in response to the emotional picture. Hazem and colleagues (Hazem et al., 2017) used the same paradigm but, instead of showing pictures with direct and averted gaze, they showed videos of a confederate wearing two different pairs of sunglasses. They manipulated the beliefs of participants by telling them that there was an online connection with the confederate, and that one pair of sunglasses was opaque (the confederate cannot see through) whereas the other was clear (the confederate can see through). ...
... Hietanen & Hietanen (2017) have shown that participants use more first person pronouns when a live face is directly gazing at them, rather than when the same face is looking away, suggesting that live direct gaze increases self-related processing. It has also been shown that the mere belief in being watched increases self-awareness (Hazem et al., 2017). However, it is unknown whether the belief in being watched is enough to trigger an increase in self-referential processing. ...
Article
Reputation management theory suggests that our behaviour changes in the presence of others to signal good reputation (audience effect). However, the specific cognitive mechanisms by which being watched triggers these changes are poorly understood. Here we test the hypothesis that these changes happen because the belief in being watched increases self-referential processing. We used a novel deceptive video-conference paradigm, where participants believe a video-clip is (or is not) a live feed of a confederate watching them. Participants completed four tasks measuring self-referential processing, prosocial behaviour and self-awareness under these two belief settings. Although the belief manipulation and self-referential effect task were effective, there were no changes on self-referential processing between the two settings, nor on prosocial behaviour and self-awareness. Based on previous evidence and these findings, we propose that further research on the role of the self, social context and personality traits will help elucidating the mechanisms underlying audience effects.
... In the second stage, if the observer can see us, then direct gaze will elicit self-referential processing, and the sense of self-involvement in the interaction will increase. This will lead to the Watching Eyes effects, causing a change in behaviour in various ways, such as enhancement of self-awareness ( Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem, George, Baltazar, & Conty, 2017;Pönkänen, Peltola, & Hietanen, 2011) or promotion of prosocial behaviours (Izuma et al., 2011(Izuma et al., , 2009), among others. ...
... Nonetheless, it is not yet known whether audience effects are mediated by self-referential processing: does the belief in being watched trigger selfreference in the same way that direct gaze does? Interestingly, a recent study on bodily self-awareness ( Hazem et al., 2017) found that participants are more accurate in rating the intensity of a physiological signal when they believe they are in online connection with someone wearing clear sunglasses (eyes are not visible but the observer can see through) rather than someone wearing opaque sunglasses (eyes are not visible and the observer cannot see through). The fact that the mere belief in being watched is enough to increase self-awareness suggests that the "self-referential power" of live direct gaze might be linked to the belief that a pair of eyes can see me. ...
... They found that, when the first picture showed direct gaze, participants were more accurate in rating the intensity of their physiological signal in response to the emotional picture. Hazem and colleagues (Hazem et al., 2017) used the same paradigm but, instead of showing pictures with direct and averted gaze, they showed videos of a confederate wearing two different pairs of sunglasses. They manipulated the beliefs of participants by telling them that there was an online connection with the confederate, and that one pair of sunglasses was opaque (the confederate cannot see through) whereas the other was clear (the confederate can see through). ...
Thesis
Full-text available
Social interactions are characterised by exchanges of a variety of social signals to communicate with other people. A key feature in real-life interactions is that we are in the presence of other people who can see us (audience), and we modulate our behaviour to send and receive signals (audience effect). Although social neuroscience research has traditionally examined how we respond to pictures and videos of humans, second-person neuroscience suggests that interactions with pre-recorded versus live people recruit distinct neurocognitive mechanisms. The aim of this thesis was to investigate which cognitive and neural mechanisms underlie changes in behaviour when being watched, particularly focusing on eye gaze, facial displays and prosocial behaviour as social signals. Using a novel ecologically valid paradigm, the first study showed that the opportunity to signal good reputation is a key modulator of eye gaze and prosocial behaviour. Using the same paradigm, the second study found no evidence to support the hypothesis that audience effects are mediated by an increase in self-referential processing. The third study focused on the time-course of eye gaze and facial displays patterns in relation to speech, both in typical and autistic individuals: contrary to what was expected both groups modulated eye gaze and facial displays according to the belief in being watched and speaker/listener role. Finally, the fourth study tested the role of reciprocity in live interactions: sharing information with a partner modulated eye gaze, facial displays, and brain activity in regions related to mentalising and decision-making. I discuss the theoretical implications of these findings and set out a cognitive model of gaze processing in live interactions. Finally, I outline directions for future research in social neuroscience.
... In the second stage, the belief in being watched embedded in direct gaze will engage self-referential processing and this will increase the sense of self-involvement in the interaction. Consequently, there will be a variety of Watching Eyes effects on behaviour, such as increments in self-relevant memory, self-awareness (Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem, George, Baltazar, & Conty, 2017;Pönkänen, Peltola, & Hietanen, 2011) and prosocial behaviour (Izuma et al., 2011(Izuma et al., , 2009. ...
... They found that, when the first picture showed direct gaze, participants were more accurate in rating the intensity of their physiological signal in response to the emotional picture. Hazem and colleagues (Hazem et al., 2017) used the same paradigm but, instead of showing pictures with direct and averted gaze, they showed videos of a confederate wearing two different pairs of sunglasses. They manipulated the beliefs of participants by telling them that there was an online connection with the confederate, and that one pair of sunglasses was opaque (the confederate cannot see through) whereas the other was clear (the confederate can see through). ...
... Hietanen & Hietanen (2017) have shown that participants use more first person pronouns when a live face is directly gazing at them, rather than when the same face is looking away, suggesting that live direct gaze increases self-related processing. It has also been shown that the mere belief in being watched increases self-awareness (Hazem et al., 2017). However, it is unknown whether the belief in being watched is enough to trigger an increase in self-referential processing. ...
Article
Full-text available
Reputation management theory suggests that our behaviour changes in the presence of others to signal good reputation (audience effect). However, the specific cognitive mechanisms by which being watched triggers these changes are poorly understood. Here we test the hypothesis that these changes happen because the belief in being watched increases self-referential processing. We used a novel deceptive video-conference paradigm, where participants believe a video-clip is (or is not) a live feed of a confederate watching them. Participants completed four tasks measuring self-referential processing, prosocial behaviour and self-awareness under these two belief settings. Although the belief manipulation and self-referential effect task were effective, there were no changes on self-referential processing between the two settings, nor on prosocial behaviour and self-awareness. Based on previous evidence and these findings, we propose that further research on the role of the self, social context and personality traits will help elucidating the mechanisms underlying audience effects.
... In the second stage, the belief in being watched embedded in direct gaze will engage self-referential processing and this will increase the sense of self-involvement in the interaction. Consequently, there will be a variety of Watching Eyes effects on behaviour, such as increments in self-relevant memory, self-awareness (Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem, George, Baltazar, & Conty, 2017;Pönkänen, Peltola, & Hietanen, 2011) and prosocial behaviour (Izuma et al., 2011(Izuma et al., , 2009. ...
... They found that, when the first picture showed direct gaze, participants were more accurate in rating the intensity of their physiological signal in response to the emotional picture. Hazem and colleagues (Hazem et al., 2017) used the same paradigm but, instead of showing pictures with direct and averted gaze, they showed videos of a confederate wearing two different pairs of sunglasses. They manipulated the beliefs of participants by telling them that there was an online connection with the confederate, and that one pair of sunglasses was opaque (the confederate cannot see through) whereas the other was clear (the confederate can see through). ...
... Hietanen & Hietanen (2017) have shown that participants use more first person pronouns when a live face is directly gazing at them, rather than when the same face is looking away, suggesting that live direct gaze increases self-related processing. It has also been shown that the mere belief in being watched increases self-awareness (Hazem et al., 2017). However, it is unknown whether the belief in being watched is enough to trigger an increase in self-referential processing. ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Reputation management theory suggests that our behaviour changes in the presence of others to signal good reputation (audience effect). However, the specific cognitive mechanisms by which being watched triggers these changes are poorly understood. Here we test the hypothesis that these changes happen because the belief in being watched increases self-referential processing. We used a novel deceptive video-conference paradigm, where participants believe a video-clip is (or is not) a live feed of a confederate watching them. Participants completed four tasks measuring self-referential processing, prosocial behaviour and self-awareness under these two belief settings. Although the belief manipulation and self-referential effect task were effective, there were no changes on self-referential processing between the two settings, nor on prosocial behaviour and self-awareness. Based on previous evidence and these findings, we propose that further research on the role of the self, social context and personality traits will help elucidating the mechanisms underlying audience effects.
... We used a paradigm previously developed by our team 6,23 . Participants were asked to rate the intensity of their bodily reactions in response to emotional pictures. ...
... Accordingly, most neuroscientific studies measured bodily self-awareness -or "interoceptive awareness" -using comparison between subjective-reports and physiological signals in the form for example of electrodermal activity 38 . In this line, we developed a paradigm to measure bodily self-awareness by the correlation between subjective-reports and skin conductance responses 6,23 . In our experiments, participants were required to rate the intensity of their internal bodily reactions in response to emotional pictures. ...
... This fits with the result that we recently obtained in relation to eye contact. Using the same paradigm as in the present study, we showed that the belief of being watched was necessary to elicit an increase of bodily self-awareness in a situation where participants faced another individual wearing opaque sunglasses 23 . Our work converges with the recent accounts of interoception that defend a key role of priors in interoceptive processing, concomitantly with bottom-up signals-i.e. ...
Article
Full-text available
Human self-awareness is arguably the most important and revealing question of modern sciences. Converging theoretical perspectives link self-awareness and social abilities in human beings. In particular, mutual engagement during social interactions-or social contact-would boost self-awareness. Yet, empirical evidence for this effect is scarce. We recently showed that the perception of eye contact induces enhanced bodily self-awareness. Here, we aimed at extending these findings by testing the influence of social contact in auditory and tactile modalities, in order to demonstrate that social contact enhances bodily self-awareness irrespective of sensory modality. In a first experiment, participants were exposed to hearing their own first name (as compared to another unfamiliar name and noise). In a second experiment, human touch (as compared to brush touch and no-touch) was used as the social contact cue. In both experiments, participants demonstrated more accurate rating of their bodily reactions in response to emotional pictures following the social contact condition-a proxy of bodily self-awareness. Further analyses indicated that the effect of social contact was comparable across tactile, auditory and visual modalities. These results provide the first direct empirical evidence in support of the essential social nature of human self-awareness.
... Two further considerations support the latter prediction of enhanced McGurk illusion when the speaker has open eyes, yet for different reasons. First, being looked at by another person increases self-referential processing (Conty et al., 2016;Hietanen & Hietanen, 2017), self-awareness (e.g., Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem et al., 2017;Pönkänen et al., 2011), and arousal (Helminen et al., 2011;Hietanen et al., 2020). Accordingly, looking into a speaker's open eyes is more demanding for the addressee than looking at a speaker's closed eyes. ...
... Presumably, the fact that speaking with closed eyes is not consistent with common social norms led to increased salience and thus caught and captured participants' attention. Apart from the fact that closed eyes might be more salient than open eyes in a conversation context, it is also possible that participants focused more on the speaker's closed compared to his open eyes because feeling another's direct gaze elicits self-referential processing ("Watching Eyes model", see Conty et al., 2016;Hietanen & Hietanen, 2017) and selfawareness (e.g., Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem et al., 2017;Pönkänen et al., 2011), increases arousal (Helminen et al., 2011), and invites for social interaction (Ho et al., 2015). Thus, in line with the finding that people avoid long eye contact with strangers (Ellsworth et al., 1972;Laidlaw et al., 2011) and look longer at faces with averted than direct gaze (Helminen et al., 2011), participants in the present study might have preferred to attend to the speaker's eyes when those were closed and they were not feeling watched, as this creates less self-involvement. ...
Article
Full-text available
Eye contact is a dynamic social signal that captures attention and plays a critical role in human communication. In particular, direct gaze often accompanies communicative acts in an ostensive function: a speaker directs her gaze towards the addressee to highlight the fact that this message is being intentionally communicated to her. The addressee, in turn, integrates the speaker’s auditory and visual speech signals (i.e., her vocal sounds and lip movements) into a unitary percept. It is an open question whether the speaker’s gaze affects how the addressee integrates the speaker’s multisensory speech signals. We investigated this question using the classic McGurk illusion, an illusory percept created by presenting mismatching auditory (vocal sounds) and visual information (speaker’s lip movements). Specifically, we manipulated whether the speaker (a) moved his eyelids up/down (i.e., open/closed his eyes) prior to speaking or did not show any eye motion, and (b) spoke with open or closed eyes. When the speaker’s eyes moved (i.e., opened or closed) before an utterance, and when the speaker spoke with closed eyes, the McGurk illusion was weakened (i.e., addressees reported significantly fewer illusory percepts). In line with previous research, this suggests that motion (opening or closing), as well as the closed state of the speaker’s eyes, captured addressees’ attention, thereby reducing the influence of the speaker’s lip movements on the addressees’ audiovisual integration process. Our findings reaffirm the power of speaker gaze to guide attention, showing that its dynamics can modulate low-level processes such as the integration of multisensory speech signals.
... Another form of social manipulation that can affect second-order performance, namely the ability to discriminate correct responses from incorrect ones is the "feeling of being watched" (Conty, George & Hietanen, 2016). To this end, earlier studies found both disrupted (Conty, Gimmig, Belletier, George & Huguet, 2010b, a) and enhanced first-order performance as a result of "feeling of being watched" (Chib, Adachi & O'Doherty, 2018) and that "feeling of being watched" can improve performance in the second-order decisions that involved monitoring of bodily affective states (Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem et al., 2017). In an attempt to further explore this relation, we investigated whether the effect of the "feeling of being watched" on physical state monitoring also applies to meta-cognitive monitoring in the form of metric error monitoring. ...
... The second aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of being watched on temporal error monitoring and if this effect is modulated by task mastery (i.e., level of timing uncertainty). In light of previous findings (Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem et al., 2017) and social facilitation theory (Zajonc, 1965;Cottrell, 1972), we hypothesized that being watched would improve the temporal error monitoring performance of the participants with high mastery level (low timing uncertainty) and that it would impair the temporal error monitoring performance of the participants with low mastery level (high timing uncertainty). ...
Article
Full-text available
A key aspect of metacognition is the ability to monitor performance. A recent line of work has shown that error-monitoring ability captures both the magnitude and direction of timing errors, thereby pointing at the metric composition of error monitoring [e.g., Akdoğan and Balcı (J Exp Psychol https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000265, 2017)]. These studies, however, primarily used a composite variable that combined isolated measures of ordinal confidence ratings (as a proxy for error magnitude judgement) and “shorter/longer than the target” judgements. In two experiments we tested temporal error monitoring (TEM) performance with a more direct measure of directional error magnitude rating on a continuum. The second aim of this study is to test if TEM performance is modulated by the feeling of being watched that was previously shown to influence metacognitive-like monitoring processes. We predicted that being watched would improve TEM performance, particularly in participants with high timing precision (a proxy for high task mastery), and disrupt TEM performance in participants with low timing precision (a proxy for low task mastery). In both experiments, we found strong evidence for TEM ability. However, we did not find any reliable effect of the social stimulus on TEM performance. In short, our results demonstrate that metric error monitoring is a robust metacognitive phenomenon, which is not sensitive to social influence.
... En résumé, la perception sociale serait caractérisée par une relation bidirectionnelle et interactive entre les mécanismes neuronaux sous-tendant les traitements sensoriels basiques des informations sociales et ceux du système de la mentalisation (Teufel, Fletcher, et al., 2010 stimuli en termes d'états mentaux. Cette démarche est au coeur de ma première étude de thèse (Hazem et al., 2017), qui sera présentée dans la partie expérimentale de cette thèse. Généraliser les effets du contact par le regard sur la conscience de soi à d'autres modalités sensorielles étayerait solidement l'hypothèse du rôle du contact social dans l'émergence de la conscience de soi. ...
... Il est possible que les capacités intéroceptives soient extrêmement variables entre individus, rendant difficile leur mise en évidence dans des études de groupes.Pour conclure, en ayant recours à un protocole original pour mesurer la conscience corporelle, nous avons pour la première fois pu mettre en évidence un effet du contact social sur la conscience d'aspect privé du soi. Ceci a été réalisé à travers un ensemble de quatre expériences(Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem, Beaurenaut, George, & Conty, 2018;Hazem et al., 2017), dont trois incluses dans cette thèse. Nous avons tour à tour montré un effet du contact par le regard, un effet de la croyance d'être observé, un effet de l'écoute de son prénom prononcé par quelqu'un d'autre et enfin un effet d'être touché par une autre personne sur la conscience corporelle. ...
Thesis
Full-text available
Les situations de contact interpersonnel participeraient à la construction d’un sens basique du soi durant l’enfance, et de nos représentations de soi tout au long de la vie. Bien que l’on retrouve cette hypothèse de manière répandue dans la littérature, elle n’a été que très peu investigué expérimentalement. Cette thèse teste cet effet potentiel chez l’adulte. Deux études combinant mesures électrophysiologiques et comportementales montrent une augmentation d’une forme minimale de conscience de soi –des informations afférentes provenant du corps– suite à un contact social. Cet effet est reproduit dans 3 modalités sensorielles (contact social visuel, auditif et tactile). Une 3ème étude en magnétoencéphalographie teste l’effet d’un contexte de contact interpersonnel multisensoriel accru (vs réduit), entre un expérimentateur et des participants, sur la connectivité fonctionnelle des réseaux cérébraux dits de repos, et sur le contenu des pensées des participants. Nos résultats mettent en évidence une augmentation des processus cérébraux et cognitifs orientés sur le soi sous une forme hautement intégrée, associée à une diminution des processus sensoriels orientés sur l’environnement extérieur, à la suite d’un contact social accru. Dans l’ensemble, nos résultats suggèrent que le contact social améliore plusieurs facettes de la représentation de soi, aussi bien des aspects corporels, que des aspects plus haut-niveau et intégrés du soi narratif. Nos interactions sociales tout au long de la vie pourraient ainsi induire un contexte cérébral et cognitif centré sur un soi multifacette qui favoriserait la conscience de soi, et la construction d’un sens de l’identité incarné et situé.
... Another intriguing possibility is that the males were sensitive to the investigator's eye gaze, but were unable to decode which signal the investigator intended to convey since eye contact provides a variety of different social signals. While eye contact may signal to pay attention, as previously discussed, eye contact also signals that one is being monitored (Guerin, 1986;Risko and Kingstone, 2011;Pönkänen et al., 2011b;Freeth et al., 2013;Baltazar et al., 2014;Marschner et al., 2015;Nasiopoulos et al., 2015;Hazem et al., 2017), and facilitates decoding of the emotional and intentional messages of others. Discerning which message is most important and/or appropriate (and requires the most attention) in a given situation may be more challenging for males than females. ...
... By presenting a video of an investigator (Experiment 4) instead of a live investigator (Experiments 1-3), the socially communicative function of eye gaze was removed. A live investigator generates an interactive context in which both the investigator and the participants can convey and observe signals with their eyes (Risko et al., , 2016Baltazar et al., 2014;Gobel et al., 2015;Jarick and Kingstone, 2015;Myllyneva and Hietanen, 2015;Nasiopoulos et al., 2015;Risko and Kingstone, 2015;Conty et al., 2016;Hietanen, 2016;Hazem et al., 2017). This is not the case when the investigator is presented over video, since the investigator cannot observe any signals that the participants convey through their eye gaze. ...
Article
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Because of their value as a socially communicative cue, researchers have strived to understand how the gaze of other people influences a variety of cognitive processes. Recent work in social attention suggests that the use of images of people in laboratory studies, as a substitute for real people, may not effectively test socially communicative aspects of eye gaze. As attention affects many other cognitive processes, it is likely that social attention between real individuals could also affect other cognitive processes, such as memory. However, from previous work alone, it is unclear whether, and if so how, socially communicative eye gaze affects memory. The present studies test the assumption that socially communicative aspects of eye gaze may impact memory by manipulating the eye gaze of a live speaker in the context of a traditional recognition paradigm used frequently in the laboratory. A female (Experiment 1) or male (Experiment 2) investigator read words aloud and varied whether eye contact was, or was not, made with a participant. With both female and male investigators, eye contact improved word recognition only for female participants and hindered word recognition in male participants. When a female investigator prolonged their eye contact (Experiment 3) to provide a longer opportunity to both observe and process the investigator’s eye gaze, the results replicated the findings from Experiments 1 and 2. The findings from Experiments 1–3 suggest that females interpret and use the investigator’s eye gaze differently than males. When key aspects from the previous experiments were replicated in a noncommunicative situation (i.e., when a video of a speaker is used instead of a live speaker; Experiment 4), the memory effects observed previously in response to eye gaze were eliminated. Together, these studies suggest that it is the socially communicative aspects of eye gaze from a real person that influence memory. The findings reveal the importance of using social cues that are communicative in nature (e.g., real people) when studying the relationship between social attention and memory.
... In the second stage, if the observer can see us, then direct gaze will elicit selfreferential processing, and the sense of self-involvement in the interaction will increase. This will lead to the Watching Eyes effects, causing a change in behavior in various ways, such as enhancement of self-awareness (Pönkänen et al., 2011;Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem et al., 2017) or promotion of prosocial actions (Izuma et al., 2011(Izuma et al., , 2009. ...
... They found that participants in the direct gaze group used more first person singular pronouns than the averted gaze group. In line with this, a recent study on bodily self-awareness (Hazem et al., 2017) has found that participants are more accurate in rating the intensity of a physiological signal when they believe they are in online connection with someone wearing clear sunglasses (the observer can see through) rather than someone wearing opaque sunglasses (the observer cannot see through). Taken together, these findings show evidence in favor of the Watching Eyes model: to trigger self-reference and self-awareness it is not enough to see a pair of eyes directly gazing at us -the belief that these pair of eyes can see us is also required. ...
Article
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Social interactions involve complex exchanges of a variety of social signals, such as gaze, facial expressions, speech and gestures. Focusing on the dual function of eye gaze, this review explores how the presence of an audience, communicative purpose and temporal dynamics of gaze allow interacting partners to achieve successful communication. First, we focus on how being watched modulates social cognition and behavior. We then show that the study of interpersonal gaze processing, particularly gaze temporal dynamics, can provide valuable understanding of social behavior in real interactions. We propose that the Interpersonal Gaze Processing model, which combines both sensing and signaling functions of eye gaze, provides a framework to make sense of gaze patterns in live interactions. Finally, we discuss how autistic individuals process the belief in being watched and interpersonal dynamics of gaze, and suggest that systematic manipulation of factors modulating gaze signaling can reveal which aspects of social eye gaze are challenging in autism.
... Importantly, interoception allows us to monitor how our internal bodily states may be affected by the states of others [1,8,22,23]. For example, direct eye contact and human touch increase the subjective experience of interoceptive sensations and modulate physiological responses to emotional stimuli [24][25][26][27]. ...
Article
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Parental caregiving during infancy is primarily aimed at the regulation of infants’ physiological and emotional states. Recent models of embodied cognition propose that interoception, i.e., the perception of internal bodily states, may influence the quality and quantity of parent-infant caregiving. Yet, empirical investigations into this relationship remain scarce. Across two online studies of mothers with 6- to 18-month-old infants during Covid-19 lockdowns, we examined whether mothers’ self-reported engagement in stroking and rocking their infant was related to self-reported interoceptive abilities. Additional measures included retrospective accounts of pregnancy and postnatal body satisfaction, and mothers’ reports of their infant’s understanding of vocabulary relating to body parts. In Study 1 (N = 151) and Study 2 (N = 111), mothers reported their engagement in caregiving behaviours and their tendency to focus on and regulate bodily states. In a subsample from Study 2 (N = 49), we also obtained an objective measure of cardiac interoceptive accuracy using an online heartbeat counting task. Across both studies, the tendency to focus on and regulate interoceptive states was associated with greater mother-infant stroking and rocking. Conversely, we found no evidence for a relationship between objective interoceptive accuracy and caregiving. The findings suggest that interoception may play a role in parental engagement in stroking and rocking, however, in-person dyadic studies are warranted to further investigate this relationship.
... In the early days of psychology, the mechanism of the eye effect on self-consciousness was studied, and experimental methods have shown that eye cues can enhance an individual's self-consciousness (Baltazar et al., 2014;Bodur et al., 2015;Govern & Marsch, 2001;Hazem et al., 2017;Myllyneva & Hietanen, 2015b). ...
Article
Tourists construct and consume tourist destinations through the tourist gaze. Simultaneously, their behaviors are exposed to the gaze of bystanders, whose “moral” gaze can be transformed into silent comments that condemn or praise, placing tourists under invisible moral surveillance and regulating their behaviors. This paper attempts to study the influence of moral gaze on tourists’ environmental responsibility behavior by initiating an experiment. The findings reveal that tourists’ self-consciousness is awakened after being influenced by moral gaze, and their perception of social norms is improved. The mechanism of reputation management and normative activation prompts tourists to consciously modify their own behavior. Through this study, it is hoped that the findings will contribute to the formulation of ecological management policies in tourism destinations.
... both the observer and the sender of the gaze, from an experiment where no gaze, mutual gaze, and send-only or receive-only conditions were compared 8 . Benefits of eye contact not only occur with interacting dyads sharing time and space, but they also happen to individuals when the partner is not visible but they believe they are being seen by the partner, and this belief enhances self-awareness 9 . The impact of eye contact has been reported not only in interactive communication, but also in judging individuals represented in the photos. ...
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During the pandemic, digital communication became paramount. Due to the discrepancy between the placement of the camera and the screen in typical smartphones, tablets and laptops, mutual eye contact cannot be made in standard video communication. Although the positive effect of eye contact in traditional communication has been well-documented, its role in virtual contexts remains less explored. In this study, we conducted experiments to gauge the impact of gaze direction during a simulated online job interview. Twelve university students were recruited as interviewees. The interview consisted of two recording sessions where they delivered the same prepared speech: in the first session, they faced the camera, and in the second, they directed their gaze towards the screen. Based on the recorded videos, we created three stimuli: one where the interviewee’s gaze was directed at the camera (CAM), one where the interviewee’s gaze was skewed downward (SKW), and a voice-only stimulus without camera recordings (VO). Thirty-eight full-time workers participated in the study and evaluated the stimuli. The results revealed that the SKW condition garnered significantly less favorable evaluations than the CAM condition and the VO condition. Moreover, a secondary analysis indicated a potential gender bias in evaluations: the female evaluators evaluated the interviewees of SKW condition more harshly than the male evaluators did, and the difference in some evaluation criteria between the CAM and SKW conditions was larger for the female interviewees than for the male interviewees. Our findings emphasize the significance of gaze direction and potential gender biases in online interactions.
... As expected, eye gaze exhibited a larger Stroop effect than vertical grating in Experiment 1, showing that eye gazing could cause cognitive interference, confirming a gazing cost in cognitive processing found in previous studies (e.g., Conty et al., 2010;Hazem et al., 2017Hazem et al., , 2018. This may be because gaze automatically and unconsciously occupies cognitive resources (Rothkirch et al., 2015), thus interfering with the current task. ...
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This study investigated the eye gaze cost in cognitive control and whether it is human-specific and body-related. In Experiment 1, we explored whether there was a cost of human eye gaze in cognitive control and extended it by focusing on the role of emotion in the cost. Stroop effect was found to be larger in eye-gaze condition than vertical grating condition, and to be comparable across positive, negative, and neutral trials. In Experiment 2, we explored whether the eye gaze cost in cognitive control was limited to human eyes. No larger Stroop effect was found in feline eye-gaze condition, neither the modulating role of emotion. In Experiment 3, we explored whether the mouth could elicit a cost in Stroop effect. Stroop effect was not significantly larger in mouth condition compared to vertical grating condition, nor across positive, negative, and neutral conditions. The results suggest that: (1) There is a robust cost of eye gaze in cognitive control; (2) Such eye-gaze cost was specific to human eyes but not to animal eyes; (3) Only human eyes could have such eye-gaze costs but not human mouth. This study supported the notion that presentation of social cues, such as human eyes, could influence attentional processing, and provided preliminary evidence that the human eye plays an important role in cognitive processing.
... Given the inherently social nature of humans, there are a vast array of neurophysiological and behavioural processes that are triggered by interacting with, or being in the presence of, other humans (Belletier, Normand & Huguet, 2019), which in turn have an impact on the decisions we make (see Bruch & Feinberg, 2017 for a review). These social decision-making effects have been observed in relation to moral decisions (Haley & Fessler, 2005), intuitive decision-making (Korom, Laszlo & Orosz, 2016), and interoception (Hazem, George, Baltazar & Conty, 2017), which is in turn related to both intuitive decision making (Kandasamy et al., 2016) and rational decision-making (Kirk, Downar, and Montague, 2011). ...
... Nevertheless, many effects in social cognition are based on beliefs that can be very easily induced. For example, presenting an image of a gaze is sufficient to induce a belief of being observed and to impact many cognitive functions (Conty, Gimmig, Belletier, George, & Huguet, 2010;Haley & Fessler, 2005;Hazem, Beaurenaut, George, & Conty, 2018;Hazem, George, Baltazar, & Conty, 2017). This belief of receiving help from a safety partner is for us the most possible interpretation of our data. ...
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Individual reactions to threat are very often thought as individualistic and antisocial. However, more than fifty years of work in sociology and social psychology indicate that humans favor social strategies when confronted with threat. Indeed, cases of cooperation and mutual aid are often reported in the literature on disasters. To implement such strategies, psychological mechanisms that allow us to process social signals conveyed by others in order to act with them must be in place and these mechanisms must be maintained and even optimized in situations of intense anxiety. Understanding how danger reconfigures how we perceive our social environment and how we represent others and their actions, as well as the incentives of such strategies, is an important theoretical challenge. To tackle this issue, we led 3 studies. In the first one, we validated a within-subject method to induce anxiety in a sustained manner: the threat-of-scream paradigm, which consists in alternating blocks in which participants are at risk of hearing aversive distress screams at any time (threat blocks) with blocks in which they are not exposed to aversive stimuli at all (safe blocks). In a second study, we used this procedure to investigate how co-representation of action (i.e. the ability to automatically integrate the actions of other individuals into our own action plans to facilitate action coordination) is impacted under threat. Results showed that co-representation (assessed by measuring the magnitude of the classical Social Simon Effect) is maintained under threat contexts, and seems to be particularly boosted when participants are exposed to danger near safe partners. Our results suggest that the potential function of co-representing others’ actions could be to promote social strategies essential for one’s own survival. Finally, the third study addressed how facial displays of fear are perceived under threat. Indeed, depending on their associated gaze direction, they can either be appraised as signaling the presence of a potential threat in the surrounding environment (averted gaze), or as a signal of distress and potential need of help (direct gaze). Using a categorization task, we investigated if danger-related or distress-related signals were prioritized under the threat-of-scream procedure. We observed that the appraisal of danger-related signals transmitted by facial displays of fear is increased under threat contexts, with no impact on the appraisal of distress signals. Altogether, our results suggest that while social strategies are maintained under threat, they might be sustained by self-preservatives motives.
... The response to being watched may draw on perceptual mentalizing (i.e., the attribution of perceptual states to other people; Teufel et al., 2010) to determine what the other person can see, and theory of mind (Tennie et al., 2010) to determine what they think. The presence of "watching eyes" could engage self-referential processing, which increases the sense of selfinvolvement in the interaction (Conty et al., 2016;Hazem et al., 2017). Furthermore, Bond (1982) proposed a selfpresentation model of audience effects, whereby participants change their behaviour to present themselves positively to the audience. ...
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Despite the recent increase in second-person neuroscience research, it is still hard to understand which neurocognitive mechanisms underlie real-time social behaviours. Here, we propose that social signalling can help us understand social interactions both at the single- and two-brain level in terms of social signal exchanges between senders and receivers. First, we show how subtle manipulations of being watched provide an important tool to dissect meaningful social signals. We then focus on how social signalling can help us build testable hypotheses for second-person neuroscience with the example of imitation and gaze behaviour. Finally, we suggest that linking neural activity to specific social signals will be key to fully understand the neurocognitive systems engaged during face-to-face interactions.
... Nevertheless, it is not because participants take part in a given task that their cognitive system solely focuses on task-related solutions and many effects in social cognition are based on beliefs that can be easily induced. For example, presenting an image of a gaze is sufficient to induce a belief of being observed and to impact several cognitive functions (Conty, Gimmig, Belletier, George, & Huguet, 2010;Haley & Fessler, 2005;Hazem, Beaurenaut, George, & Conty, 2018;Hazem, George, Baltazar, & Conty, 2017). Still, more direct evidence should be provided to validate our interpretation, by for example, replicating this study in the presence of a non-human agent or in the presence of a confederate who would be injured/constrained vs. human/healthy/unconstrained. ...
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Several studies have shown that individuals automatically integrate the actions of other individuals into their own action plans, thus facilitating action coordination. What happens to this mechanism in situations of danger? This capacity could either be reduced, in order to allocate more cognitive resources for individualistic actions, or be maintained or enhanced to enable cooperation under threat. In order to determine the impact of the perception of danger on this capacity, two groups of participants carried out, in pairs, the Social Simon task, which provides a measure of co-representation. The task was performed during so-called 'threat blocks' (during which participants could be exposed at any time to an aversive stimulus) and so-called 'safety blocks' (during which no aversive stimulation could occur). In a first group of participants, both individuals were exposed at the same time to threat blocks. In a second group, only one of the two participants was exposed to them at a time. Our results indicate that co-representation, an important cognitive mechanism for cooperation, (i) is preserved in situations of danger; and (ii) may even be increased in participants who are confronted alone to threat but in the presence of a safe partner. Contrarily to popular belief, danger does not shut down our capacities for social interaction.
... Par ailleurs, certaines dimensions de la conscience de soi objective, notamment la conscience de soi publique, qui décrit l'attention que porte un individu à la manière dont il est perçu par autrui, illustrent la manière dont l'environnement social contribue au rapport à soi. La présence d'un observateur social présente par ailleurs la même capacité qu'un miroir à induire l'état de conscience de soi objective , et peut même entraîner une conscience de soi physique exacerbée (Hazem et al, 2017). ...
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La conscience de soi permet à un individu de se connaître et de réaliser son action sur le monde. Ces travaux concernent la compréhension des liens entre la conscience de soi et les formes de mémoire associées au self (mémoire épisodique et autobiographique) des patients et des patientes présentant des troubles de la mémoire associés au stress. Trois populations ont été étudiées : des patient∙e∙s présentant un ictus amnésique idiopathique, des patients∙e∙s avec une amnésie dissociative et des personnes exposées à un trauma (les attaques du 13/11/2015 à Paris) présentant ou non un trouble de stress post-traumatique (TSPT). Ces trois perturbations de la mémoire ont en commun leur origine fonctionnelle (atteinte de la fonction cognitive sans lésion « mécanique » des structures cérébrales qui sous-tendent cette fonction) et la présence récurrente d’un événement stressant, voire traumatique pour le TSPT, dans le déclenchement du trouble. Ce travail adopte une double perspective, à la fois fondamentale (contribuer aux modèles décrivant les relations entre mémoire et conscience de soi) et clinique (contribuer à la compréhension des symptômes mnésiques associés au stress dans une perspective neuropsychologique). Cette thèse commence par une introduction théorique visant à définir les différents concepts dissimulés sous les dénominations génériques de « conscience », de « self » et de « conscience de soi ». Ensuite, trois études originales sont présentées étudiant différentes dimensions de la conscience de soi en situation de perturbation mnésique liée au stress. La première étudie la focalisation de l’attention sur soi chez des patient∙e∙s présentant ou ayant présenté un ictus amnésique idiopathique. La seconde étude compare l’utilisation des pronoms personnels dans les récits autobiographiques de patient∙e∙s en phase aiguë d’ictus amnésique et dans ceux de personnes avec une amnésie dissociative. Enfin, la troisième étude explore les contenus de récits personnels associés ou non à un traumatisme selon les participant∙e∙s, chez des personnes ayant été exposées aux attaques du 13/11 à Paris. La discussion propose une ouverture sur les origines cérébrales des mécanismes observés dans le cadre de ces études et s’inscrit dans un large champ de recherche qui cherche à expliquer les conséquences neurocognitives du stress sur la mémoire des individus.
... Unlike direct gaze, this fixation point stimulus may provide a less obvious signal of the self-relevance of subsequent spatial cues. This interpretation also aligns with findings of direct gaze increasing self-referential processing and self-involvement in social interactions (Baltazar et al., 2014;Hazem et al., 2017;Pönkänen et al., 2011), while modulating social attention and arousal (Conty et al., 2016;Senju & Johnson, 2009). It is also possible that eye contact primes participants to respond to subsequent gaze shifts by attenuating attention in a way that does not necessarily recruit higher-order mentalising representations. ...
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Eye movements provide important signals for joint attention. However, those eye movements that indicate bids for joint attention often occur among non-communicative eye movements. This study investigated the influence of these non-communicative eye movements on subsequent joint attention responsivity. Participants played an interactive game with an avatar which required both players to search for a visual target on a screen. The player who discovered the target used their eyes to initiate joint attention. We compared participants' saccadic reaction times (SRTs) to the avatar's joint attention bids when they were preceded by non-communicative eye movements that predicted the location of the target (Predictive Search), did not predict the location of the target (Random Search), and when there were no non-communicative eye gaze movements prior to joint attention (No Search). We also included a control condition in which participants completed the same task, but responded to a dynamic arrow stimulus instead of the avatar's eye movements. For both eye and arrow conditions, participants had slower SRTs in Random Search trials than No Search and Predictive Search trials. However, these effects were smaller for eyes than for arrows. These data suggest that joint attention responsivity for eyes is relatively stable to the presence and predictability of spatial information conveyed by non-communicative gaze. Contrastingly, random sequences of dynamic arrows had a much more disruptive impact on subsequent responsivity compared with predictive arrow sequences. This may reflect specialised social mechanisms and expertise for selectively responding to communicative eye gaze cues during dynamic interactions, which is likely facilitated by the integration of ostensive eye contact cues.
... A possible reason that explains the discrepancy between that study and our own would be that while direct gaze conveys the signal that another person may intend to interact, being recorded by a camera may not necessarily indicate this. Recently, Hazem, George, Baltazar, and Conty (2017) demonstrated that presenting a pre-recorded video showing an actor facing the viewer increased participants' bodily self-awareness, but only when participants believed themselves to be in live connection with the actor. In addition, not only a face with a direct gaze but also social contact in the auditory (hearing one's own name) or tactile (human touch) modality has been shown to produce a similar enhancement effect of bodily self-awareness (Hazem, Beaurenaut, George, & Conty, 2018). ...
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Direct-gaze signals are known to modulate human cognition, including self-awareness. In the present study, we specifically focused on 'bodily' self-awareness and examined whether direct gaze would modulate one's interoceptive accuracy (IAcc)-the ability to accurately monitor internal bodily sensations. While viewing a photograph of a frontal face with a direct gaze, an averted face or a mere white cross as a baseline, participants were required to count their heartbeats without taking their pulse. The results showed higher IAcc in the direct-gaze condition than in the averted-face or baseline condition. This was particularly the case in participants with low IAcc at baseline, indicating that direct gaze enhanced the participants' IAcc. Importantly, their heart rate was not different while viewing the direct gaze and averted face, suggesting that sensitivity to interoceptive signals, rather than physiological arousal, is heightened by direct gaze. These findings demonstrate the role of social signals in our bodily interoceptive processing and support the notion of the social nature of self-awareness.
... We found that depressive scores negatively correlated with the private learning rate in the social context (α S ), thus indicating that the effect was consistent with a secondary impairment and was specific to the learning (as opposed to the decision) process. In other words, our computational results suggest that one possible way in which depressive symptoms affect learning in social contexts is conceptually similar to a negative audience effect [32,33], where the presence of social signals (the demonstrator's choices) induces a reduction of subjects' instrumental performance. ...
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Depression is characterized by a marked decrease in social interactions and blunted sensitivity to rewards. Surprisingly, despite the importance of social deficits in depression, non-social aspects have been disproportionally investigated. As a consequence, the cognitive mechanisms underlying atypical decision-making in social contexts in depression are poorly understood. In the present study, we investigate whether deficits in reward processing interact with the social context and how this interaction is affected by self-reported depression and anxiety symptoms in the general population. Two cohorts of subjects (discovery and replication sample: N = 50 each) took part in an experiment involving reward learning in contexts with different levels of social information (absent, partial and complete). Behavioral analyses revealed a specific detrimental effect of depressive symptoms–but not anxiety–on behavioral performance in the presence of social information, i.e. when participants were informed about the choices of another player. Model-based analyses further characterized the computational nature of this deficit as a negative audience effect, rather than a deficit in the way others’ choices and rewards are integrated in decision making. To conclude, our results shed light on the cognitive and computational mechanisms underlying the interaction between social cognition, reward learning and decision-making in depressive disorders.
... This provided clear evidence that sensory coding of a gaze cue's physical characteristics can be top-down modulated by mental-state attribution 21 . Studies investigating gaze dependent autonomic responses 22 , evoked brain activity 23 and reflexive attentional responses 24,25 , similarly suggested that attributions of mental state overlap with processing of gaze information. Extrapolating from this literature we could for example hypothesize that gaze processing might interact with Observer's assumptions of how clearly the Actor can see him/her. ...
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We investigated gaze direction determination in dyadic interactions mediated by an Augmented Reality (AR) head-mounted-display. With AR, virtual content is overlaid on top of the real-world scene, offering unique data visualization and interaction opportunities. A drawback of AR however is related to uncertainty regarding the AR user’s focus of attention in social-collaborative settings: an AR user looking in our direction might either be paying attention to us or to augmentations positioned somewhere in between. In two psychophysical experiments, we assessed what impact assumptions concerning the positioning of virtual content attended by an AR user have on other people’s sensitivity to their gaze direction. In the first experiment we found that gaze discrimination was better when the participant was aware that the AR user was focusing on stimuli positioned on their depth plane as opposed to being positioned halfway between the AR user and the participant. In the second experiment, we found that this modulatory effect was explained by participants’ assumptions concerning which plane the AR user was focusing on, irrespective of these being correct. We discuss the significance of AR reduced gaze determination in social-collaborative settings as well as theoretical implications regarding the impact of this technology on social behaviour.
... Interoception is linked to the representation of social peripersonal space [35] and influences sensibility for the emotions of others [36]. Moreover, socially induced self-focus, operationalized via eye contact [37] and its mediated social attention [38], enhances participants' ability to rate their physiological arousal level in emotional contexts. Interestingly, observing their partner's face enhances interoceptive accuracy only in participants scoring low in interoception beforehand [39], suggesting that social interaction in general and a stable interpersonal relationship in particular promote access to interoceptive and thus emotional signals, potentially facilitating its regulation in social contexts. ...
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Purpose of review: We review evidence for the potential importance of interoception, i.e., the processing of signals arising from inside the body, for deficient psychosocial functioning in borderline personality disorder (BPD). Recent findings: Evidence suggests that variability in interoception interacts with higher-order psychological functions such as self, other, and emotion processing. These domains are characteristically impaired in BPD, suggesting a likely causal role of disturbed interoception in the etiology of the disorder. The inability to identify and describe one's own emotional states represents a proxy of impaired interoception which might further mediate between the perception of inner physiological conditions and psychosocial functioning in BPD. There is preliminary evidence explaining how early life stress might adversely affect central interoceptive representation and psychosocial functioning in BPD. Based on these findings and the specific pattern of disturbances in BPD, we propose the crucial role of interoception in an integrated biobehavioral model for BPD.
Article
There is ample behavioral evidence that others' mere presence can affect any behavior in human and non-human animals, generally facilitating the expression of mastered responses while impairing the acquisition of novel ones. Much less is known about i) how the brain orchestrates the modulation of such a wide array of behaviors by others' presence and ii) when these neural underpinnings mature during development. To address these issues, fMRI data were collected in children and adults alternately observed and unobserved by a familiar peer. Subjects performed a numerosity comparison task and a phonological comparison task. While the former involves number-processing brain areas, the latter involves language-processing areas. Consistent with previous behavioral findings, adults' and children's performance improved in both tasks when observed by a peer. Across all participants, task-specific brain regions showed no reliable change in activity under peer observation. Rather, we found task-independent changes in domain-general brain regions typically involved in mentalizing, reward, and attention. Bayesian analyses singled out the attention network as the exception to the close child-adult resemblance of peer observation neural substrates. These findings suggest that i) social facilitation of some human education-related skills is primarily orchestrated by domain-general brain networks, rather than by task-selective substrates, and ii) apart from attention, peer presence neural processing is largely mature in children.
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COVID-19 forced social interactions to move online. Yet researchers have little understanding of the mental-health consequences of this shift. Given pandemic-related surges in emotional disorders and problematic drinking, it becomes imperative to understand the cognitive and affective processes involved in virtual interactions and the impact of alcohol in virtual social spaces. Participants ( N = 246) engaged in an online video call while their gaze behavior was tracked. Before the interaction, participants were randomly assigned to receive an alcoholic or control beverage. Participants’ affect was repeatedly assessed. Results indicated that a proportionally larger amount of time spent gazing at oneself (vs. one’s interaction partner) predicted significantly higher negative affect after the exchange. Furthermore, alcohol independently increased self-directed attention, failing to demonstrate its typically potent social-affective enhancement in this virtual context. Results carry potential implications for understanding factors that increase risk for hazardous drinking and negative affect in an increasingly virtual world.
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We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy where everyone is always open to surveillance, where there are no secrets – William O Douglas. This case aims to explore the effects of camera surveillance on individual behaviour at the workplace. We observe that we unconsciously tend to modify our natural behaviour into a designed one as required by the camera, what is called prosocial behaviour. Workplace surveillance has many advantages and applications for theft detection and employee discipline. However, it also impacts employees who may not be enacting deviant behaviour at the workplace. This issue needs to be addressed, as it can affect not only psychological behaviours leading to unseen disorders, but also productivity at the workplace.
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Eye contact is a powerful social signal, and it readily captures attention. Recent work has suggested that direct gaze is prioritized even unconsciously: faces rendered invisible via interocular suppression enter awareness faster when they look directly at (vs. away from) you. Such effects may be driven in a relatively low level way by the special visual properties of eyes, per se, but here we asked whether they might instead arise from the perception of a deeper property: being the focus of another agent's attention and/or intentions. We report five experiments which collectively explore whether visual awareness also prioritizes distinctly non-eye-like stimuli that nevertheless convey directedness. We first showed that directed (vs. averted) ‘mouth’ shapes also break through into awareness faster, after being rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression — a direct ‘gaze’ effect without any eyes. But such effects could still be specific to faces (if not eyes), so we next asked whether the prioritization of directed intentions would still occur even for stimuli that have no faces at all. In fact, even simple geometric shapes can be seen as intentional, as when numerous randomly scattered cones are all consistently pointing at you. And indeed, even such directed (vs. averted) cones entered awareness faster — a direct ‘gaze’ effect without any facial cues. Additional control experiments ruled out effects of both symmetry and response biases. We conclude that the perception of directed intentions is sufficient to boost objects into awareness, and that putative eye-contact effects might instead reflect more general phenomena of ‘mind contact’.
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Depression is characterized by a marked decrease in social interactions and blunted sensitivity to rewards. Surprisingly, despite the importance of social deficits in depression, non-social aspects have been disproportionally investigated. As a consequence, the cognitive mechanisms underlying atypical decision-making in social contexts in depression are poorly understood. In the present study, we investigate whether deficits in reward processing interact with the social context and how this interaction is affected by self-reported depression and anxiety symptoms. Two cohorts of subjects (discovery and replication sample: N = 50 each) took part in a task involving reward learning in a social context with different levels of social information (absent, partial and complete). Behavioral analyses revealed a specific detrimental effect of depressive symptoms, but not anxiety; on behavioral performance in the presence of social information, i.e. when participants were informed about the choices of another player. Model-based analyses further characterized the computational nature of this deficit as a negative audience effect, rather than a deficit in the way choices of others and rewards are integrated in decision making. To conclude, our results shed light on the cognitive and computational mechanisms underlying the interaction between social cognition, reward learning and decision-making in depressive disorders.
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The perception of direct gaze—that is, of another individual’s gaze directed at the observer—is known to influence a wide range of cognitive processes and behaviors. We present a new theoretical proposal to provide a unified account of these effects. We argue that direct gaze first captures the beholder’s attention and then triggers self-referential processing, i.e., a heightened processing of stimuli in relation with the self. Self-referential processing modulates incoming information processing and leads to the Watching Eyes effects, which we classify into four main categories: the enhancement of self-awareness, memory effects, the activation of pro-social behavior, and positive appraisals of others. We advance that the belief to be the object of another’s attention is embedded in direct gaze perception and gives direct gaze its self-referential power. Finally, we stress that the Watching Eyes effects reflect a positive impact on human cognition; therefore, they may have a therapeutic potential, which future research should delineate.
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Previous research with both animal and human subjects has shown that startle reflex magnitude is potentiated in an aversive stimulus context, relative to responses elicited in a neutral or appetitive context. In the present experiment, the same pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral picture stimuli were repeatedly presented to human subjects. Startle reflex habituation was assessed in each stimulus context and was compared with the habituation patterns of heart rate, electrodermal, and facial corrugator muscle responses. All systems showed initial differentiation among affective picture contents and general habituation over trials. The startle reflex alone, however, continued to differentiate among pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures throughout the presentation series. These results suggest that (a) the startle probe reflex is relatively uninfluenced by stimulus novelty, (b) the startle modulatory circuit (identified with amygdala-reticular connections in animals) varies systematically with affective valence, and (c) the modulatory influence is less subject to habituation than is the obligatory startle pathway or responses in other somatic and autonomic systems.
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The perception of direct gaze—that is, of another individual’s gaze directed at the observer—is known to influence a wide range of cognitive processes and behaviors. We present a new theoretical proposal to provide a unified account of these effects. We argue that direct gaze first captures the beholder’s attention and then triggers self-referential processing, i.e., a heightened processing of stimuli in relation with the self. Self-referential processing modulates incoming information processing and leads to the Watching Eyes effects, which we classify into four main categories: the enhancement of self-awareness, memory effects, the activation of pro-social behavior, and positive appraisals of others. We advance that the belief to be the object of another’s attention is embedded in direct gaze perception and gives direct gaze its self-referential power. Finally, we stress that the Watching Eyes effects reflect a positive impact on human cognition; therefore, they may have a therapeutic potential, which future research should delineate.
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Direct gaze is an engaging and important social cue, but the meaning of direct gaze depends heavily on the surrounding context. This paper reviews some recent studies of direct gaze, to understand more about what neural and cognitive systems are engaged by this social cue and why. The data show that gaze can act as an arousal cue and can modulate actions, and can activate brain regions linked to theory of mind and self-related processing. However, all these results are strongly modulated by the social meaning of a gaze cue and by whether participants believe that another person is really watching them. The implications of these contextual effects and audience effects for our theories of gaze are considered. © 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
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Empirically analyzing empirical evidence One of the central goals in any scientific endeavor is to understand causality. Experiments that seek to demonstrate a cause/effect relation most often manipulate the postulated causal factor. Aarts et al. describe the replication of 100 experiments reported in papers published in 2008 in three high-ranking psychology journals. Assessing whether the replication and the original experiment yielded the same result according to several criteria, they find that about one-third to one-half of the original findings were also observed in the replication study. Science , this issue 10.1126/science.aac4716
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Previous research has shown that physiological arousal and attentional responses to eye contact are modulated by one’s knowledge of whether they are seen by another person. Recently it was shown that this ‘eye contact effect’ can be elicited without seeing another person’s eyes at all. We aimed to investigate whether the eye contact effect is actually triggered by the mere knowledge of being seen by another individual, i.e. even in a condition when the perceiver does not see the other person at all. We measured experienced self-awareness and both autonomic and brain activity responses while participants were facing another person (a model) sitting behind a window. We manipulated the visibility of the model and the participants’ belief of whether or not the model could see them. When participants did not see the model but believed they were seen by the model, physiological responses were attenuated in comparison to when both parties saw each other. However, self-assessed public self-awareness was not attenuated in this condition. Thus, two requirements must be met for physiological responses to occur in response to eye contact: an experience of being seen by another individual and an experience of seeing the other individual.
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Interoception can be broadly defined as the sense of signals originating within the body. As such, interoception is critical for our sense of embodiment, motivation, and well-being. And yet, despite its importance, interoception remains poorly understood within modern science. This paper reviews interdisciplinary perspectives on interoception, with the goal of presenting a unified perspective from diverse fields such as neuroscience, clinical practice, and contemplative studies. It is hoped that this integrative effort will advance our understanding of how interoception determines well-being, and identify the central challenges to such understanding. To this end, we introduce an expanded taxonomy of interoceptive processes, arguing that many of these processes can be understood through an emerging predictive coding model for mind–body integration. The model, which describes the tension between expected and felt body sensation, parallels contemplative theories, and implicates interoception in a variety of affective and psychosomatic disorders. We conclude that maladaptive construal of bodily sensations may lie at the heart of many contemporary maladies, and that contemplative practices may attenuate these interpretative biases, restoring a person’s sense of presence and agency in the world.
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In a classic study, Haley and Fessler showed that displaying subtle eye-like stimuli caused participants to behave more generously in the Dictator Game. Since their paper was published, there have been both successful replications and null results reported in the literature. However, it is important to clarify that two logically separable effects were found in their original experiment: watching eyes made the mean donation higher, and also increased the probability of donating something rather than nothing. Here, we report a replication study with 118 participants, in which we found that watching eyes significantly increased the probability of donating something, but did not increase the mean donation. Results did not depend on the sex of the participants or the sex of the eyes. We also present a meta-analysis of the seven studies of watching eye effects in the Dictator Game published to date. Combined, these studies total 887 participants, and show that although watching eyes do not reliably increase mean donations, they do reliably increase the probability of donating something rather than nothing (combined odds ratio 1.39). We conclude that the watching eyes effect in the Dictator Game is robust, but its interpretation may require refinement. Rather than making people directionally more generous, it may be that watching eyes reduce variation in social behavior.
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Interoception refers to the sensing of internal bodily changes. Interoception interacts with cognition and emotion, making measurement of individual differences in interoceptive ability broadly relevant to neuropsychology. However, inconsistency in how interoception is defined and quantified led to a three-dimensional model. Here, we provide empirical support for dissociation between dimensions of: (1) interoceptive accuracy (performance on objective behavioural tests of heartbeat detection), (2) interoceptive sensibility (self-evaluated assessment of subjective interoception, gauged using interviews/questionnaires) and (3) interoceptive awareness (metacognitive awareness of interoceptive accuracy, e.g. confidence-accuracy correspondence). In a normative sample (N = 80), all three dimensions were distinct and dissociable. Interoceptive accuracy was only partly predicted by interoceptive awareness and interoceptive sensibility. Significant correspondence between dimensions emerged only within the sub-group of individuals with greatest interoceptive accuracy. These findings set the context for defining how the relative balance of accuracy, sensibility and awareness dimensions explain cognitive, emotional and clinical associations of interoceptive ability.
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West African cultural contexts foster higher levels of attention to the bodily signals compared with the European American contexts. Interoception, or the processing of signals from the body, is a key component of emotional reactivity. Interoceptive awareness (i.e., the self-reported tendency to attend to physiological changes) and accuracy (i.e., the ability to accurately detect physiological changes) are distinct aspects of interoception. Does the West African cultural emphasis on interoceptive awareness affect individuals’ abilities to accurately perceive physiological changes in response to emotional stimuli? West African and European American young adults watched a fear-inducing film clip and continuously rated their perception of heart rate changes in response to the clip. Actual heart rates were also recorded continuously. Cross-correlations were calculated between measures of perceived and actual heart rate. Although average levels of coherence between these measures were low across groups, West Africans showed higher levels of interoceptive awareness, but lower levels of interoceptive accuracy than European Americans. These results suggest that cultural scripts of attending to the body may affect coupling between actual and perceived physiological reactivity in the context of emotions. These results have implications for studying cultural shaping of somatic presentation of mood and anxiety disorders.
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Attending where others gaze is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social cognition. The present study is the first to examine the impact of the attribution of mind to others on gaze-guided attentional orienting and its ERP correlates. Using a paradigm in which attention was guided to a location by the gaze of a centrally presented face, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the gazer: gaze behavior was believed to result either from operations of a mind or from a machine. In Experiment 1, beliefs were manipulated by cue identity (human or robot), while in Experiment 2, cue identity (robot) remained identical across conditions and beliefs were manipulated solely via instruction, which was irrelevant to the task. ERP results and behavior showed that participants' attention was guided by gaze only when gaze was believed to be controlled by a human. Specifically, the P1 was more enhanced for validly, relative to invalidly, cued targets only when participants believed the gaze behavior was the result of a mind, rather than of a machine. This shows that sensory gain control can be influenced by higher-order (task-irrelevant) beliefs about the observed scene. We propose a new interdisciplinary model of social attention, which integrates ideas from cognitive and social neuroscience, as well as philosophy in order to provide a framework for understanding a crucial aspect of how humans' beliefs about the observed scene influence sensory processing.
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'Self-objectification' is the tendency to experience one's body principally as an object, to be evaluated for its appearance rather than for its effectiveness. Within objectification theory, it has been proposed that self-objectification accounts for the poorer interoceptive awareness observed in women, as measured by heartbeat perception. Our study is, we believe, the first specifically to test this relationship. Using a well-validated and reliable heartbeat perception task, we measured interoceptive awareness in women and compared this with their scores on the Self-Objectification Questionnaire, the Self-Consciousness Scale and the Body Consciousness Questionnaire. Interoceptive awareness was negatively correlated with self-objectification. Interoceptive awareness, public body consciousness and private body consciousness together explained 31% of the variance in self-objectification. However, private body consciousness was not significantly correlated with interoceptive awareness, which may explain the many nonsignificant results in self-objectification studies that have used private body consciousness as a measure of body awareness. We propose interoceptive awareness, assessed by heartbeat perception, as a measure of body awareness in self-objectification studies. Our findings have implications for those clinical conditions, in women, which are characterised by self-objectification and low interoceptive awareness, such as eating disorders.
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A growing consensus in social cognitive neuroscience holds that large portions of the primate visual brain are dedicated to the processing of social information, i.e., to those aspects of stimuli that are usually encountered in social interactions such as others' facial expressions, actions, and symbols. Yet, studies of social perception have mostly employed simple pictorial representations of conspecifics. These stimuli are social only in the restricted sense that they physically resemble objects with which the observer would typically interact. In an equally important sense, however, these stimuli might be regarded as "non-social": the observer knows that they are viewing pictures and might therefore not attribute current mental states to the stimuli or might do so in a qualitatively different way than in a real social interaction. Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of such higher-order conceptualization of the stimulus for social perceptual processing. Here, we assess the similarity between the various types of stimuli used in the laboratory and object classes encountered in real social interactions. We distinguish two different levels at which experimental stimuli can match social stimuli as encountered in everyday social settings: (1) the extent to which a stimulus' physical properties resemble those typically encountered in social interactions and (2) the higher-level conceptualization of the stimulus as indicating another person's mental states. We illustrate the significance of this distinction for social perception research and report new empirical evidence further highlighting the importance of mental state attribution for perceptual processing. Finally, we discuss the potential of this approach to inform studies of clinical conditions such as autism.
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How is introspection related to accurate self-perception? Self-focused attention is said to facilitate accurate judgments of cognitive aspects (attitudes, standards, and attributions) and somatic aspects (sensations, arousal, physical symptoms, emotions) of self. The present skeptical review concludes that the "perceptual accuracy hypothesis" is unsupported. There is simply little direct evidence, and the indirect evidence is better explained by objective self-awareness theory's core tenet: Self-focus increases consistency motivation. Most studies have also failed to appreciate the complexity of establishing the accuracy of self-judgment. The authors discuss some conceptual issues that future work should recognize, such as the logics of accuracy research, the role of honesty standards in accurate self-reports, differences in self-perception and object perception, and the implications of different self-theories for accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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The ability to understand and predict others' behavior is essential for successful interactions. When making predictions about what other humans will do, we treat them as intentional systems and adopt the intentional stance, i.e., refer to their mental states such as desires and intentions. In the present experiments, we investigated whether the mere belief that the observed agent is an intentional system influences basic social attention mechanisms. We presented pictures of a human and a robot face in a gaze cuing paradigm and manipulated the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance by instruction: in some conditions, participants were told that they were observing a human or a robot, in others, that they were observing a human-like mannequin or a robot whose eyes were controlled by a human. In conditions in which participants were made to believe they were observing human behavior (intentional stance likely) gaze cuing effects were significantly larger as compared to conditions when adopting the intentional stance was less likely. This effect was independent of whether a human or a robot face was presented. Therefore, we conclude that adopting the intentional stance when observing others' behavior fundamentally influences basic mechanisms of social attention. The present results provide striking evidence that high-level cognitive processes, such as beliefs, modulate bottom-up mechanisms of attentional selection in a top-down manner.
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Interoceptive sensitivity is an essential component of recent models of "the self." Increased focus on the self (e.g., self-observation in a mirror) can enhance aspects of self-processing. We examined whether self-observation also enhances interoceptive sensitivity. Participants performed a heartbeat detection task while looking at their own face in a mirror or at a black screen. There was significant improvement in interoceptive sensitivity in the mirror condition for those participants with lower interoceptive sensitivity at baseline. This effect was independent of the order of conditions, gender, age, body mass index, habitual exercise, and changes in heart rate. Our results suggest that self-observation may represent a viable way of manipulating individuals' interoceptive sensitivity, in order to directly test causal relations between interoceptive sensitivity and exteroceptive self-processing.
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When two people meet in a bar, a subtle interplay of social behaviours, including eye contact and unconscious mimicry of actions play an important role in how much the individuals like each other by the end of the evening. However, it is not known how these different social signals interact. Here, we adopt a rapid mimicry paradigm, to test if eye contact can modulate mimicry on a second by second time scale. Our results show that direct eye contact rapidly and specifically enhances mimicry of hand actions. These findings have implications for understanding the role of eye contact as a controlling signal in human non-verbal social behaviour.
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When presented with a face stimulus whose gaze is diverted, observers' attention shifts to locations fixated by the face. Such "gaze following" has been characterized by some previous studies as a consequence of sophisticated theory of mind processes, but by others (particularly those employing the "gaze-cuing" paradigm) as an involuntary response that is triggered directly and reflexively by the physical features of a face. To address this apparent contradiction, we modified the gaze-cuing paradigm using a deception procedure to convince observers that prerecorded videos of an experimenter making head turns and wearing mirrored goggles were a "live" video link to an adjacent room. In two experiments, reflexive gaze following was found when observers believed that the model was wearing transparent goggles and could see, but it was significantly reduced when they believed that the experimenter wore opaque goggles and could not see. These results indicate that the attribution of the mental state "seeing" to a face plays a role in controlling even reflexive gaze following.
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Emotional reactions are organized by underlying motivational states--defensive and appetitive--that have evolved to promote the survival of individuals and species. Affective responses were measured while participants viewed pictures with varied emotional and neutral content. Consistent with the motivational hypothesis, reports of the strongest emotional arousal, largest skin conductance responses, most pronounced cardiac deceleration, and greatest modulation of the startle reflex occurred when participants viewed pictures depicting threat, violent death, and erotica. Moreover, reflex modulation and conductance change varied with arousal, whereas facial patterns were content specific. The findings suggest that affective responses serve different functions-mobilization for action, attention, and social communication-and reflect the motivational system that is engaged, its intensity of activation, and the specific emotional context.
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Editor’s Note: Science has always relied on reproducibility to build confidence in experimental results. Now, the most comprehensive investigation ever done about the rate and predictors of reproducibility in social and cognitive sciences has found that regardless of the analytic method or criteria used, fewer than half of the original findings were successfully replicated. While a failure to reproduce does not necessarily mean the original report was incorrect, the results suggest that more rigorous methods are long overdue.
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Recent studies have shown enhanced brain and autonomic responses to seeing a face with a direct gaze. Interestingly, greater responses to eye contact vs. averted gaze have been observed when showing “live” faces as stimuli but not when showing pictures of faces on a computer screen. In this study, we provide unequivocal evidence that the differential responses observed in the “live” condition are dependent on the observer’s mental attributions. Results from two experiments showed that eye contact resulted in greater autonomic and brain responses compared to averted gaze if a participant believed that the stimulus person sitting on the other side of an electronic shutter was able to see him or her through the shutter. Gaze direction had no effects if participants believed that the transparency from their side was blocked. The results suggest that mental attributions exert a powerful modulation on the processing of socially relevant sensory information.
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Eye contact is a typical human behaviour known to impact concurrent or subsequent cognitive processing. In particular, it has been suggested that eye contact induces self-awareness, though this has never been formally proven. Here, we show that the perception of a face with a direct gaze (that establishes eye contact), as compared to either a face with averted gaze or a mere fixation cross, led adult participants to rate more accurately the intensity of their physiological reactions induced by emotional pictures. Our data support the view that bodily self-awareness becomes more acute when one is subjected to another’s gaze. Importantly, this effect was not related to a particular arousal state induced by eye contact perception. Rejecting the arousal hypothesis, we suggest that eye contact elicits a self-awareness process by enhancing self-focused attention in humans. We further discuss the implications of this proposal.
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Recent systematic reviews and empirical evaluations of the cognitive sciences literature suggest that publication and other reporting biases are prevalent across diverse domains of cognitive science. In this review, we summarize the various forms of publication and reporting biases and other questionable research practices, and overview the available methods for probing into their existence. We discuss the available empirical evidence for the presence of such biases across the neuroimaging, animal, other preclinical, psychological, clinical trials, and genetics literature in the cognitive sciences. We also highlight emerging solutions (from study design to data analyses and reporting) to prevent bias and improve the fidelity in the field of cognitive science research.
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How do we decide what another person is "really like"? How do we influence the impressions others form of us, and how do their reactions affect us in turn? In "Interpersonal Perception" one of the world's leading social psychologists explores these and other intriguing questions about the nature of social interaction. Drawing on nearly 40 years of person perception research, much of it his own, Edward E. Jones provides a unified framework for understanding the thought processes underlying interpersonal relations and illuminates the complex interplay of motive, cognitive inference, and behavior in our encounters with others. Illustrated throughout with examples drawn from daily life and from psychological experiments, and spiced with personal reflections, the book provides a remarkable synthesis of work in the field. Personal, provocative, illuminating, "Interpersonal Perception" should be of great interest to students, professionals, and serious general readers alike. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(cover)
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One year after publishing "False-Positive Psychology," we propose a simple implementation of disclosure that requires but 21 words to achieve full transparency. This article is written in a casual tone. It includes phone-taken pictures of milk-jars and references to ice-cream and sardines.
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This study investigated whether the direct gaze of others influences attentional disengagement from faces in an experimental situation. Participants were required to fixate on a centrally presented face with varying gaze directions and to detect the appearance of a peripheral target as quickly as possible. Results revealed that target detection was delayed when the preceding face was directly gazing at the subject (direct gaze), as compared with an averted gaze (averted gaze) or with closed eyes (closed eyes). This effect disappeared when a temporal gap was inserted between the offset of the centrally presented face and the onset of a peripheral target, suggesting that attentional disengagement contributed to the delayed response in the direct gaze condition. The response delay to direct gaze was not found when the contrast polarity of eyes in the facial stimuli was reversed, reinforcing the importance of gaze perception in delayed disengagement from direct gaze.
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This study extended that of von Grünau and Anston (1995) and explored whether perceived direct gaze is easily detected by individuals with and without autism, utilizing a visual-search paradigm. Participants detected target faces with either direct gaze or averted gaze. Laterally averted faces were used to eliminate the involvement of lower perceptual characteristics such as symmetry, which were inherent with the “straight gaze” used by von Grünau and Anston. Both typically developed adults and children detected targets with direct gaze more quickly than those with averted gaze, but face inversion distorted this asymmetrical performance, suggesting the contribution of configurative facial processing. In contrast, children with autism were not affected by the gaze direction presented by realistic facial stimuli. They were, however, faster to detect straight gaze defined solely by local features, which suggests that their impairment might be specific to the detection of direct gaze presented within a facial context.
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A study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect, but it is less well appreciated that low power also reduces the likelihood that a statistically significant result reflects a true effect. Here, we show that the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low. The consequences of this include overestimates of effect size and low reproducibility of results. There are also ethical dimensions to this problem, as unreliable research is inefficient and wasteful. Improving reproducibility in neuroscience is a key priority and requires attention to well-established but often ignored methodological principles.
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Women were videotaped while they spoke about a positive and a negative experience either in the presence of an experimenter or alone. They gave self-reports of their emotional experience, and the videotapes were rated for facial and verbal expression of emotion. Participants spoke less about their emotions when the experimenter (E) was present. When E was present, during positive disclosures they smiled more, but in negative disclosures they showed less negative and more positive expression. Facial behavior was only related to experienced emotion during positive disclosure when alone. Verbal behavior was related to experienced emotion for positive and negative disclosures when alone. These results show that verbal and nonverbal behaviors, and their relationship with emotional experience, depend on the type of emotion, the nature of the emotional event, and the social context.
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An experimental situation was designed to investigate the differential effects of eye contact and unreciprocated gaze upon GSR activity. Twenty male and twenty female subjects gazed continuously at the eyes of a confederate, who either returned the gaze or looked at a spot on a wall 30° to the right of the subject's head, according to a prearranged program. The subjects' GSR was monitored throughout the period.Both frequency (p < .02) and amplitude (p < .001) of GSR responses were greater when subjects' gazes were reciprocated, (eye contact), than when unreciprocated. There were no main effects of sex.
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Recently, we showed that another person's gaze direction influenced the perceiver's frontal EEG asymmetry and autonomic arousal in response to freely viewed real faces, but not in response to face pictures. However, the lack of a task during the viewing may have resulted in less attention allocation to face pictures vs. live faces. In the present study, the participants performed two online tasks while viewing the faces presented live through an electronic shutter and as pictures on a computer screen. The results replicated those from our previous experiment showing that direct gaze elicited greater relative left-sided frontal EEG asymmetry and autonomic arousal than averted gaze but, again, only in the live condition. However, the results also showed that two live stimulus faces (male and female) elicited differential EEG asymmetry responses in our participants (all females), and the effects of gaze direction were observed only for the (live) female faces. The results suggest that the discriminative responses to live faces vs. pictures are likely to reflect the participants' enhanced mental-state attributions and self-awareness when looking at and being looked by live faces. Thus, the motivation- and affect-related psychophysiological responses to gaze direction are most discriminative in the presence of another person, regardless of whether the face/gaze is actively monitored or not.
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The present study investigated the effect of stimulus duration on skin conductance responses (SCRs) evoked by different gaze directions of a live person. In two separate parts of the experiment, either two fixed stimulus durations (2s and 5s) or a participant-controlled stimulus duration was used. The results showed that the eye contact evoked enhanced SCRs compared to averted gaze or closed eyes conditions irrespective of the presentation time. Subjective evaluations of approach-avoidance-tendencies indicated that the direct gaze elicited either approach or avoidance, depending on the participant. Participants who had evaluated a direct gaze-condition as approachable were found to be more emotionally stabile than those who had evaluated the same condition as avoidable. In the self-timing condition, averted gaze was looked at longer than direct gaze. Our results suggest that direct gaze, also when encountered only briefly like in every-day social encounterings, increases autonomic sympathetic arousal.
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A current consensus views social perception as a bottom-up process in which the human brain uses social signals to make inferences about another's mental state. Here we propose that, contrary to this model, even the most basic perceptual processing of a social stimulus and closely associated automatic responses are modulated by mental-state attribution. We suggest that social perception is subserved by an interactive bidirectional relationship between the neural mechanisms supporting basic sensory processing of social information and the theory-of-mind system. Consequently, processing of a social stimulus cannot be divorced from its representation in terms of mental states. This hypothesis has far-reaching implications for our understanding of both the healthy social brain and characteristic social failures in psychopathology.
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Perceived gaze contact in seen faces may convey important social signals. We examined whether gaze perception affects face processing during two tasks: Online gender judgement, and later incidental recognition memory. Individual faces were presented with eyes directed either straight towards the viewer or away, while these faces were seen in either frontal or three-quarters view. Participants were slower to make gender judgements for faces with direct versus averted eye gaze, but this effect was particularly pronounced for faces with opposite gender to the observer, and seen in three-quarters view. During subsequent surprise recognition-memory testing, recognition was better for faces previously seen with direct than averted gaze, again especially for the opposite gender to the observer. The effect of direct gaze was stronger in both tasks when the head was seen in three-quarters rather than in frontal view, consistent with the greater salience of perceived eye contact for deviated faces. However, in the memory test, face recognition was also relatively enhanced for faces of opposite gender in front views when their gaze was averted rather than direct. Together, these results indicate that perceived eye contact can interact with facial processing during gender judgements and recognition memory, even when gaze direction is task-irrelevant, and particularly for faces of opposite gender to the observer (an influence which controls for stimulus factors when considering observers of both genders). These findings appear consistent with recent neuroimaging evidence that social facial cues can modulate visual processing in cortical regions involved in face processing and memory, presumably via interconnections with brain systems specialized for gaze perception and social monitoring.
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Gaze direction is an important social signal in both human and nonhuman primates, providing information about conspecifics' attention, interests, and intentions. Single-unit recordings in macaques have revealed neurons selective for others' specific gaze direction. A parallel functional organization in the human brain is indicated by gaze-adaptation experiments, in which systematic distortions in gaze perception following prolonged exposure to static face images reveal dynamic interactions in local cortical circuitry. However, our understanding of the influence of high-level social cognition on these processes in monkeys and humans is still rudimentary. Here we show that the attribution of a mental state to another person determines the way in which the human brain codes observed gaze direction. Specifically, we convinced observers that prerecorded video sequences of an experimenter gazing left or right were a live video link to an adjacent room. The experimenter wore mirrored goggles that observers believed were either transparent such that the person could see, or opaque such that the person could not see. The effects of adaptation were enhanced under the former condition relative to the latter, indicating that high-level sociocognitive processes shape and modulate sensory coding of observed gaze direction.
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The 'eye contact effect' is the phenomenon that perceived eye contact with another human face modulates certain aspects of the concurrent and/or immediately following cognitive processing. In addition, functional imaging studies in adults have revealed that eye contact can modulate activity in structures in the social brain network, and developmental studies show evidence for preferential orienting towards, and processing of, faces with direct gaze from early in life. We review different theories of the eye contact effect and advance a 'fast-track modulator' model. Specifically, we hypothesize that perceived eye contact is initially detected by a subcortical route, which then modulates the activation of the social brain as it processes the accompanying detailed sensory information.
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Male and female US college students were randomly assigned to one of six groups, in which they viewed a 60-s videotape. The content of the tape was derived from the factorial combination of sex of model on the tape and duration of eye contact (5 s, 30 s or 50 s) maintained by the model with an interviewer. After viewing the tape, participants completed three inventories as they thought the model in the tape had viewed would. The inventories measured state, trait, and test anxiety. The results showed that, as eye contact maintained by the model increased, the model was judged to have less state anxiety, less trait anxiety, and less test anxiety. This effect was more pronounced for the female model than for the male model. The data extended previous experimental and correlational findings that, as eye contact increases, an individual is judged more positively. Also, the results show that these positive attributions are made with respect to both situational and dispositional personality characteristics.
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Previous research with both animal and human subjects has shown that startle reflex magnitude is potentiated in an aversive stimulus context, relative to responses elicited in a neutral or appetitive context. In the present experiment, the same pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral picture stimuli were repeatedly presented to human subjects. Startle reflex habituation was assessed in each stimulus context and was compared with the habituation patterns of heart rate, electrodermal, and facial corrugator muscle responses. All systems showed initial differentiation among affective picture contents and general habituation over trials. The startle reflex alone, however, continued to differentiate among pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures throughout the presentation series. These results suggest that (a) the startle probe reflex is relatively uninfluenced by stimulus novelty, (b) the startle modulatory circuit (identified with amygdala-reticular connections in animals) varies systematically with affective valence, and (c) the modulatory influence is less subject to habituation than is the obligatory startle pathway or responses in other somatic and autonomic systems.
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Colored photographic pictures that varied widely across the affective dimensions of valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and arousal (excited-calm) were each viewed for a 6-s period while facial electromyographic (zygomatic and corrugator muscle activity) and visceral (heart rate and skin conductance) reactions were measured. Judgments relating to pleasure, arousal, interest, and emotional state were measured, as was choice viewing time. Significant covariation was obtained between (a) facial expression and affective valence judgments and (b) skin conductance magnitude and arousal ratings. Interest ratings and viewing time were also associated with arousal. Although differences due to the subject's gender and cognitive style were obtained, affective responses were largely independent of the personality factors investigated. Response specificity, particularly facial expressiveness, supported the view that specific affects have unique patterns of reactivity. The consistency of the dimensional relationships between evaluative judgments (i.e., pleasure and arousal) and physiological response, however, emphasizes that emotion is fundamentally organized by these motivational parameters.
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To comprehend psychosomatic processes, it will be necessary to understand the brain's influences on bodily functions and also the body's afferent sensory input to the central nervous system, including the effects of this input on behavior and cognitive functions, especially emotion. The objective of this Presidential Address is to review what is known circa the year 2000 of the processes and mechanisms of visceral sensory psychobiology, often called interoception. Over 1000 publications that have appeared since the 19th century were reviewed to prepare this review, including a group that are specifically cited here. Factors and data were reviewed that were identified as germane to understanding interoception. These included definitional issues, historical roots, the neural basis, studies and results in the cardiovascular-respiratory and alimentary-gastrointestinal systems, studies of emotion, and studies in people with mental disorders. Drug and hormone effects, pain, proprioception, and phantom limb or organ factors, and the role of awareness were briefly described. Methodological issues, methods of study including functional imaging, and possible future directions for study were identified. Understanding the physical basis of psychosomatic processes, including the so-called mind-body problem, will require a detailed understanding the psychobiology of interoception.
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This article discusses the manipulation and measurement of levels of situational self-focus, which is generally labeled "self-awareness." A new scale was developed to quantify levels of public and private self-awareness. Five studies were conducted to assess the psychometric properties, reliability, and validity of the Situational Self-Awareness Scale (SSAS). The SSAS was found to have a reliable factor structure, to detect differences in public and private self-awareness produced by laboratory manipulations, and to be sensitive to changes in self-awareness within individuals over time and across situations. The SSAS can be used as a manipulation check of laboratory self-awareness manipulations and as a means of assessing naturally occurring fluctuations in public and private self-awareness in order to clarify the relation between self-awareness and other variables (e.g., mood and memory).