The world smiles at me: Self-referential positivity bias when interpreting direction of attention

Recent research suggests that eye-gaze direction modulates perceived emotional expression. Here we explore the extent to which emotion affects interpretation of attention direction. We captured three-dimensional face models of 8 actors expressing happy, fearful, angry and neutral emotions. From these 3D models 9 views were extracted (0°, 2°, 4°, 6°, 8° to the left and right). These stimuli were randomly presented for 150 ms. Using a forced-choice paradigm 28 participants judged for each face whether or not it was attending to them. Two conditions were tested: either the whole face was visible, or the eyes were covered. In both conditions happy faces elicited most “attending-to-me” answers. Thus, emotional expression has a more general effect than an influence on gaze direction: emotion affects interpretation of attention direction. We interpret these results as a self-referential positivity bias, suggesting a general preference to associate a happy face with the self.     

A closer look at the size of the gaze-liking effect: a preregistered replication

This study is a direct replication of gaze-liking effect using the same design, stimuli and procedure. The gaze-liking effect describes the tendency for people to rate objects as more likeable when they have recently seen a person repeatedly gaze toward rather than away from the object. However, as subsequent studies show considerable variability in the size of this effect, we sampled a larger number of participants (N?=?98) than the original study (N?=?24) to gain a more precise estimate of the gaze-liking effect size. Our results indicate a much smaller standardised effect size (d_z?=?0.02) than that of the original study (d_z?=?0.94). Our smaller effect size was not due to general insensitivity to eye-gaze effects because the same sample showed a clear (d_z?=?1.09) gaze-cuing effect – faster reaction times when eyes looked toward vs away from target objects. We discuss the implications of our findings for future studies wishing to study the gaze-liking effect.     

People look at the object they fear: oculomotor capture by stimuli that signal threat

It is known that people covertly attend to threatening stimuli even when it is not beneficial for the task. In the current study we examined whether overt selection is affected by the presence of an object that signals threat. We demonstrate that stimuli that signal the possibility of receiving an electric shock capture the eyes more often than stimuli signalling no shock. Capture occurred even though the threat-signalling stimulus was neither physically salient nor task relevant at any point during the experiment. Crucially, even though fixating the threat-related stimulus made it more likely to receive a shock, results indicate that participants could not help but doing it. Our findings indicate that the presence of a stimulus merely signalling the possibility of receiving a shock is prioritised in selection, and exogenously captures the eyes even when this ultimately results in the execution of the threat (i.e. receiving a shock). Oculomotor capture was particularly pronounced for the fastest saccades which is consistent with the idea that threat influences visual selection at an early stage of processing, when selection is mainly involuntarily.     

Attention to faces and gaze-following in social anxiety: preliminary evidence from a naturalistic eye-tracking investigation

Social attentional biases are a core component of social anxiety disorder, but research has not yet determined their direction due to methodological limitations. Here we present preliminary findings from a novel, dynamic eye-tracking paradigm allowing spatial–temporal measurement of attention and gaze-following, a mechanism previously unexplored in social anxiety. 105 participants took part, with those high (N?=?27) and low (N?=?25) in social anxiety traits (HSA and LSA respectively) entered into the analyses. Participants watched a video of an emotionally-neutral social scene, where two actors periodically shifted their gaze towards the periphery. HSA participants looked more at the actors’ faces during the initial 2s than the LSA group but there were no group differences in proportion of first fixations to the face or latency to first fixate the face, although HSA individuals’ first fixations to the face were shorter. No further differences in eye movements were found, nor in gaze-following behaviour, although these null effects could potentially result from the relatively small sample. Findings suggest attention is biased towards faces in HSA individuals during initial scene inspection, but that overt gaze-following may be impervious to individual differences in social anxiety. Future research should seek to replicate these effects.     

镜子，影子，背后的里子 镜子是用来照什么? 有时候只是装饰，有时候是用来看别人

在我们的生活环境里,有许多器物作为生活的一部分与人的关系早已经是不可分割了。从最早偶然的灵感演变到现在的形貌,这个过程与人们的生活以及社会文化是密切相关的,器物设计风格的演变与技术发展是也是相辅相成的。从古代达官贵人钟爱的工艺精湛的手工制品到现代社会的物质文明,新材料与工艺的出现,经济条件和生活方式的变化.人们的美学观点和趣味爱好也在跟着改变,器物与设计的关系也越来越紧密了。     

Backward affective priming: Even when the prime is late, people still evaluate

It is well-established that affective stimuli can prime congruent evaluations if they precede the target within a short time interval, i.e., forward affective priming. The present research examines whether similar effects occur if affective primes succeed target presentation, i.e., backward affective priming. Experiments 1 found short-lived, yet reliable backward affective priming. Experiment 2 found parallel forward affective priming in the same paradigm. Experiment 3 found forward and backward affective priming in a within-subjects design. Comparison with neutral primes suggested that the observed effects were mainly due to interference. Backward affective priming is a robust phenomenon that may reflect a rapid and continuous evaluation of environmental stimuli.     

Vulnerability to depression is associated with a failure to acquire implicit social appraisals

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with disrupted relationships with partners, family, and peers. These problems can precipitate the onset of clinical illness, influence severity and the prospects for recovery. Here, we investigated whether individuals who have recovered from depression use interpersonal signals to form favourable appraisals of others as social partners. Twenty recovered-depressed adults (with >1 adult episode of MDD but euthymic and medication-free for six months) and 23 healthy, never-depressed adults completed a task in which the gaze direction of some faces reliably cued the location a target (valid faces), whereas other faces cued the opposite location (invalid faces). No participants reported awareness of this contingency, and both groups were significantly faster to categorise targets following valid compared with invalid gaze cueing faces. Following this task, participants judged the trustworthiness of the faces. Whereas the healthy never-depressed participants judged the valid faces to be significantly more trustworthy than the invalid faces; this implicit social appraisal was absent in the recovered-depressed participants. Individuals who have recovered from MDD are able to respond appropriately to joint attention with other people but appear to not use joint attention to form implicit trust appraisals of others as potential social partners.     

Looking at the eyes of happiness: Positive emotions mediate the influence of life satisfaction on attention to happy faces

Despite significant advancements in the research of subjective well-being (SWB), little is known about its connection with basic cognitive processes. The present study explores the association between selective attention to emotional stimuli (i.e. emotional faces) and both the emotional and cognitive components of SWB (i.e. emotional well-being and satisfaction in life, respectively). Participants (N?=?83) were asked to freely watch a series of 84 pairs of emotional (happy, angry, or sad) and neutral faces from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database. Eye-tracking methodology measured first fixations, number of fixations, and the time spent looking at emotional faces. Results showed that both the emotional and cognitive components of SWB were related to a general bias to attend to happy faces and avoid sad faces. Yet, bootstrapping analyses showed that positive emotions, rather than life satisfaction, were responsible for the positive information-processing bias. We discuss the potential functionality of these biases and their implications for research on positive emotions.     

Socially Situated Transmission: The Bias to Transmit Negative Information is Moderated by the Social Context

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large-scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals.     

Attention to one word at a time in reading is still a viable hypothesis: rejoinder to Inhoff, Radach, and Eiter (2006)

A. W. Inhoff, R. Radach, and B. Eiter argue that the current version of the E-Z Reader model (A. Pollatsek, E. D. Reichle, & K. Rayner) cannot explain 2 key findings in their data, and as a result, the assumption of words being attended to 1 at a time is likely to be false. In this rejoinder, the authors argue that the E-Z Reader model can easily explain the 1st of the 2 phenomena and that the 2nd phenomenon is likely to be at least partially an artifact of changing displays during fixations. The authors also argue that their assumptions about attention shifting are not contrary to the attention literature and that the assumption that A. W. Inhoff et al. deem to be unrealistic (i.e., instantaneous shifting of attention) is easily modified within the architecture of the model.     

Daydreaming to navigate the social world: What we know,what we don't know,and why it matters

A substantial portion of daily life is spent daydreaming—that is, engaged in thought independent of, and unrelated to, goals in the external environment. We argue that this naturally occurring, unconstrained cognition is a vital, but currently underappreciated, form of social cognition that enables navigation of the social world. First, we present the results of a meta‐analysis of neuroimaging studies which illustrate the shared neural basis of daydreaming and social cognition (including regions of the anterior temporal lobes and the posterior cingulate cortex). Second, we review evidence regarding the frequency, correlates, and adaptive outcomes of social daydreaming, cumulative findings that point to the adaptive value of imaging others during this offline state. We end by encouraging cross‐fertilization between daydreaming research and domains of social psychology (goal pursuit, social interactions, and close relationships), which we hope will foster mutually beneficial directions for understanding the role that unconstrained thinking plays in social life.     

Improving theory,measurement, and reality to advance the future of emotion research

ABSTRACT

In this short contribution, I reflect on three domains I think are important to advance emotion research. The first concerns theoretical progress, which I hope will occur in the form of theoretical unification that will allow for a consensual definition and understanding of its main object of study. The second concerns measurement where in parallel to technological advances to measure behaviour and biology, particularly the measurement of experience deserves more attention. The third concerns reality, where I advocate the need to study real-world phenomena.     

ERP components activated by the "GO!" and "WITHHOLD!" conflict in the random Sustained Attention to Response Task

The present study investigates the event related potential (ERP) components associated with the random version of the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). The random SART is a Go/No-Go task in which the No-Go target appears unpredictably and rarely. In the present experiment, the EEG was recorded from 58 electrodes with mastoids as reference. As expected, the N2 and P3 were larger in the No-Go trials compared to the Go trials, with the P3 more frontal for the No-Go trials compared to the Go trials. The functional role of the N2 and P3 in the No-Go trials is discussed comparing our results to the fixed SART results obtained by Dockree et al. [Dockree P. M., Kelly S. P., Robertson I. H., Reilly R. B., & Foxe J. J. (2005). Neurophysiological markers of alert responding during goal-directed behaviour: A high-density electrical mapping study. NeuroImage, 27, 587-601]. In addition, the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) was computed. The absence of an LRP in the No-Go trials suggests that a central inhibitory mechanism intervenes to prevent the preparation and execution of a dominant motor response.     

Anxiety, a benefit and detriment to cognition: behavioral and magnetoencephalographic evidence from a mixed-saccade task

Anxiety is typically considered an impediment to cognition. We propose anxiety-related impairments in cognitive-behavioral performance are the consequences of enhanced stimulus-driven attention. Accordingly, reflexive, habitual behaviors that rely on stimulus-driven mechanisms should be facilitated in an anxious state, while novel, flexible behaviors that compete with the former should be impaired. To test these predictions, healthy adults (N=17) performed a mixed-saccade task, which pits habitual actions (pro-saccades) against atypical ones (anti-saccades), under anxiety-inducing threat of shock and safe conditions. Whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) captured oscillatory responses in the preparatory interval preceding target onset and saccade execution. Results showed threat-induced anxiety differentially impacted response times based on the type of saccade initiated, slowing anti-saccades but facilitating erroneous pro-saccades on anti-saccade trials. MEG source analyses revealed that successful suppression of reflexive pro-saccades and correct initiation of anti-saccades during threat was marked by increased theta power in right ventrolateral prefrontal cortical and midbrain regions (superior colliculi) implicated in stimulus-driven attention. Theta activity may delay stimulus-driven processes to enable generation of an anti-saccade. Moreover, compared to safety, threat reduced beta desynchronization in inferior parietal cortices during anti-saccade preparation but increased it during pro-saccade preparation. Differential effects in inferior parietal cortices indicate a greater readiness to execute anti-saccades during safety and to execute pro-saccades during threat. These findings suggest that, in an anxiety state, reduced cognitive-behavioral flexibility may stem from enhanced stimulus-driven attention, which may serve the adaptive function of optimizing threat detection.     

Mirroring,imitation, identification: the sense of self in relation to the mother's internal world

The phenomenon of neonatal imitation, and the use of mutual imitation by mother and baby in the service of attunement, are considered in relation to psychoanalytic theories of mirroring, imitation and identification. Material from infant observation and from the treatment of two children on the autistic spectrum is discussed in terms of the suggestion that developmental imitation implies a perceived position of balance between the external baby and the mother's supposed internal occupant. This is seen as making possible introjective identification and assimilation, with the enrichment of the sense of identity, in contrast to the kind of imitation involving mimicry, in which adhesive or projective identification may be operative.     

Around the world,adolescence is a time of heightened sensation seeking and immature self‐regulation

The dual systems model of adolescent risk‐taking portrays the period as one characterized by a combination of heightened sensation seeking and still‐maturing self‐regulation, but most tests of this model have been conducted in the United States or Western Europe. In the present study, these propositions are tested in an international sample of more than 5000 individuals between ages 10 and 30 years from 11 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, using a multi‐method test battery that includes both self‐report and performance‐based measures of both constructs. Consistent with the dual systems model, sensation seeking increased between preadolescence and late adolescence, peaked at age 19, and declined thereafter, whereas self‐regulation increased steadily from preadolescence into young adulthood, reaching a plateau between ages 23 and 26. Although there were some variations in the magnitude of the observed age trends, the developmental patterns were largely similar across countries.