Attention to eye contact in the West and East: Autonomic responses and evaluative ratings

Eye contact has a fundamental role in human social interaction. The special appearance of the human eye (i.e., white sclera contrasted with a coloured iris) implies the importance of detecting another person's face through eye contact. Empirical studies have demonstrated that faces making eye contact are detected quickly and processed preferentially (i.e., the eye contact effect). Such sensitivity to eye contact seems to be innate and universal among humans; however, several studies suggest that cultural norms affect eye contact behaviours. For example, Japanese individuals exhibit less eye contact than do individuals from Western European or North American cultures. However, how culture modulates eye contact behaviour is unclear. The present study investigated cultural differences in autonomic correlates of attentional orienting (i.e., heart rate) and looking time. Additionally, we examined evaluative ratings of eye contact with another real person, displaying an emotionally neutral expression, between participants from Western European (Finnish) and East Asian (Japanese) cultures. Our results showed that eye contact elicited stronger heart rate deceleration responses (i.e., attentional orienting), shorter looking times, and higher ratings of subjective feelings of arousal as compared to averted gaze in both cultures. Instead, cultural differences in the eye contact effect were observed in various evaluative responses regarding the stimulus faces (e.g., facial emotion, approachability etc.). The rating results suggest that individuals from an East Asian culture perceive another's face as being angrier, unapproachable, and unpleasant when making eye contact as compared to individuals from a Western European culture. The rating results also revealed that gaze direction (direct vs. averted) could influence perceptions about another person's facial affect and disposition. These results suggest that cultural differences in eye contact behaviour emerge from differential display rules and cultural norms, as opposed to culture affecting eye contact behaviour directly at the physiological level.Public Library of Science open acces

Combining facial and postural expressions of emotions in a virtual character

Abstract. Psychology suggests highly synchronized expressions of emotion across different modalities. Few experiments jointly studied the relative contribution of facial expression and body posture to the overall perception of emotion. Computational models for expressive virtual characters have to consider how such combinations will be perceived by users. This paper reports on two studies exploring how subjects perceived a virtual agent. The first study evaluates the contribution of the facial and postural expressions to the overall perception of basic emotion categories, as well as the valence and activation dimensions. The second study explores the impact of incongruent expressions on the perception of superposed emotions which are known to be frequent in everyday life. Our results suggest that the congruence of facial and bodily expression facilitates the recognition of emotion categories. Yet, judgments were mainly based on the emotion expressed in the face but were nevertheless affected by postures for the perception of the activation dimension

Reflexive orienting in response to eye gaze and an arrow in children with and without autism

Background: This study investigated whether another person's social attention, specifically the direction of their eye gaze, and a non‐social directional cue, an arrow, triggered reflexive orienting in children with and without autism in an experimental situation. Methods: Children with autism and typically developed children participated in one of two experiments. Both experiments involved the localization of a target that appeared to the left or right of the fixation point. Before the target appeared, the participant's attention was cued to the left or right by either an arrow or the direction of eye gaze on a computerized face. Results: Children with autism were slower to respond, which suggests a slight difference in the general cognitive ability of the groups. In Experiment 1, although the participants were instructed to disregard the cue and the target was correctly cued in only 50% of the trials, both groups of children responded significantly faster to cued targets than to uncued targets, regardless of the cue. In Experiment 2, children were instructed to attend to the direction opposite that of the cues and the target was correctly cued in only 20% of the trials. Typically developed children located targets cued by eye gaze more quickly, while the arrow cue did not trigger such reflexive orienting in these children. However, both social and non‐social cues shifted attention to the cued location in children with autism. Conclusion: These results indicate that eye gaze attracted attention more effectively than the arrow in typically developed children, while children with autism shifted their attention equally in response to eye gaze and arrow direction, failing to show preferential sensitivity to the social cue. Difficulty in shifting controlled attention to the instructed side was also found in children with autism