Look away! Eyes and arrows engage oculomotor responses automatically

The present study investigates how people’s voluntary saccades are influenced by where another person is looking, even when this is counterpredictive of the intended saccade direction. The color of a fixation point instructed participants to make saccades either to the left or right. These saccade directions were either congruent or incongruent with the eye gaze of a centrally presented schematic face. Participants were asked to ignore the eyes, which were congruent only 20% of the time. At short gaze—fixation-cue stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; 0 and 100 msec), participants made more directional errors on incongruent than on congruent trials. At a longer SOA (900 msec), the pattern tended to reverse. We demonstrate that a perceived eye gaze results in an automatic saccade following the gaze and that the gaze cue cannot be ignored, even when attending to it is detrimental to the task. Similar results were found for centrally presented arrow cues, suggesting that this interference is not unique to gazes.     

The influence of eye-gaze and arrow pointing distractor cues on voluntary eye movements

We investigated Ricciardelli et al.'s (2002) claim, that the tendency for gaze direction to elicit automatic attentional following is unique to biologically significant information. Participants made voluntary saccades to targets on the left or the right of a display, which were either congruent or incongruent with a centrally presented distractor (eye-gaze or arrow). Contrary to Ricciardelli et al., for both distractor types, saccade latencies were slower, and participants made more directional errors, on incongruent than on congruent trials. Moreover, a cost-benefit analysis showed no difference between the two distractor types. However, latencies for erroneous saccades were faster than correctly directed saccades for the eye-gaze distractors, but not for the arrow distractors.     

Group prevention of depression and anxiety symptoms

To prevent depression and anxiety, we delivered a brief, classroom-based cognitive-behavioral workshop along with ongoing Web-based materials and e-mail coaching to college students at risk for depression. At risk was defined as having mild to moderate depressive symptoms on a self-report measure of depression. Two hundred forty students were randomized into either an eight-week workshop that met in groups of 10, once per week for 2 h or into an assessment-only control group. We plan to track participants for 3 years after the workshop and here we report the 6 month preventive effects on depression and anxiety. The workshop group had significantly fewer depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms than the control group, but there was no significant difference between the conditions on depression or anxiety episodes at 6 month follow up. The workshop group had significantly better well being than the control group, and the workshop group had significantly greater improvement in optimistic explanatory style than the control group. Improved explanatory style was a significant mediator of the prevention effects from pre- to post-workshop for depressive and anxiety symptoms, as well as for improved well being.     

Living in the soap bubble: the infertile couple and the standstill of the transcendent function in the treatment of an adolescent girl1

Abstract: This paper considers disturbances of identity and developmental breakdown in the phase of ‘emergent adulthood’ with young adults together with a disturbance of the capacity of the Self for coniunctio. It is proposed that the capacity for effective intrapsychic linking as conceptualized in analytic psychology with the concepts of the coniunctio and the transcendent function, is disturbed because of an unconscious identification with an infertile ‘couple’. This unconscious couple fantasy can lead to a standstill of the transcendent function and prevents the growth of meaning via the linking between parts of the psyche. This can lead to considerable clinical disturbances. A clinical vignette from the treatment of an adolescent girl should illustrate these hypotheses. The patient had developed a not good enough internal space and she suffered from fragmentation anxieties. She tried to control these anxieties by obsessive behaviour and by forms of adhesive identification. The standstill of the transcendent function was manifested when the patient developed a negative therapeutic reaction.     

Why are you looking at me? It’s because I’m talking,but mostly because I’m staring or not doing much

Our attention is particularly driven toward faces, especially the eyes, and there is much debate over the factors that modulate this social attentional orienting. Most of the previous research has presented faces in isolation, and we tried to address this shortcoming by measuring people’s eye movements whilst they observe more naturalistic and varied social interactions. Participants’ eye movements were monitored whilst they watched three different types of social interactions (monologue, manual activity, active attentional misdirection), which were either accompanied by the corresponding audio as speech or by silence. Our results showed that (1) participants spent more time looking at the face when the person was giving a monologue, than when he/she was carrying out manual activities, and in the latter case they spent more time fixating on the person’s hands. (2) Hearing speech significantly increases the amount of time participants spent looking at the face (this effect was relatively small), although this was not accounted for by any increase in mouth-oriented gaze. (3) Participants spent significantly more time fixating on the face when direct eye contact was established, and this drive to establish eye contact was significantly stronger in the manual activities than during the monologue. These results highlight people’s strategic top-down control over when they attend to faces and the eyes, and support the view that we use our eyes to signal non-verbal information.     

Outline of a new principle of mathematical psychology (1851)

Summary The paper presents a translation of Appendix 2 of the second volume of Fechner's Zend-Avesta (1851), which contains the first outline of psychophysics as the quantitative science of mind-body relations. Fechner argues that mathematical psychology must be based on observation of physical phenomena, because observation of mental phenomena results in equality judgments only. The logarithmic formula is not yet based on Weber's law, but on various observations showing that mental intensities increase at a slower rate than the corresponding physical intensities. The physical substrate of mental phenomena is oscillatory and can be decomposed into a main wave and ripples superimposed on it, a conception which is illustrated by attentional phenomena and by sleeping and waking. The notion of negative sensations is introduced and discussed. A variant of the logarithmic law is proposed for higher mental activities. Throughout, Fechner's main concern is with what he called inner psychophysics in his later writings.Translated and edited by Eckart Scheerer Selection from: G. T. Fechner, Zend-Avesta;; oder über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits, Leipzig: Voss 1851, Vol. 2, pp. 373–386