Eye Contact Judgment Is Influenced by Perceivers' Social Anxiety But Not by Their Affective State

Fast and accurate judgment of whether another person is making eye contact or not is crucial for our social interaction. As affective states have been shown to influence social perceptions and judgments, we investigated the influence of observers' own affective states and trait anxiety on their eye contact judgments. In two experiments, participants were required to judge whether animated faces (Experiment 1) and real faces (Experiment 2) with varying gaze angles were looking at them or not. Participants performed the task in pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant odor conditions. The results from two experiments showed that eye contact judgments were not modulated by observers' affective state, yet participants with higher levels of social anxiety accepted a wider range of gaze deviations from the direct gaze as eye contact. We conclude that gaze direction judgments depend on individual differences in affective predispositions, yet they are not amenable to situational affective influences

Beliefs about the Minds of Others Influence How We Process Sensory Information

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

Follow My Eyes: The Gaze of Politicians Reflexively Captures the Gaze of Ingroup Voters

Studies in human and non-human primates indicate that basic socio-cognitive operations are inherently linked to the power of gaze in capturing reflexively the attention of an observer. Although monkey studies indicate that the automatic tendency to follow the gaze of a conspecific is modulated by the leader-follower social status, evidence for such effects in humans is meager. Here, we used a gaze following paradigm where the directional gaze of right- or left-wing Italian political characters could influence the oculomotor behavior of ingroup or outgroup voters. We show that the gaze of Berlusconi, the right-wing leader currently dominating the Italian political landscape, potentiates and inhibits gaze following behavior in ingroup and outgroup voters, respectively. Importantly, the higher the perceived similarity in personality traits between voters and Berlusconi, the stronger the gaze interference effect. Thus, higher-order social variables such as political leadership and affiliation prepotently affect reflexive shifts of attention

Sex-linked mating strategies diverge with a manipulation of genital salience

Trivers (Sexual selection and the descent of man, Aldine-Atherton, Chicago, pp 136–179, 1972) proposed that evolutionary factors should favor divergent mating strategies for males versus females. Such differences may be less pronounced among human beings than other animals and social norms and sex roles are also pertinent influences. The present experiment (N = 133 college undergraduates, 74 female) sought to bypass some of these other influences. Participants were randomly assigned to a condition designed to increase attention to the genital region (a downward pointing arrow) or not (an upward pointing arrow). They then reported on their interest in short-term (e.g., a one-night stand) and long-term (e.g., a potential marital partner) mating opportunities. A theory-consistent three-way interaction occurred such that the genital salience manipulation primed a shorter-term reproductive strategy among men and a longer-term reproductive strategy among women. The results provide unique support for evolution-linked ideas about sex differences in the form of a role for bodily attention

Granger Causality Mapping during Joint Actions Reveals Evidence for Forward Models That Could Overcome Sensory-Motor Delays

Studies investigating joint actions have suggested a central role for the putative mirror neuron system (pMNS) because of the close link between perception and action provided by these brain regions [1], [2], [3]. In contrast, our previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment demonstrated that the BOLD response of the pMNS does not suggest that it directly integrates observed and executed actions during joint actions [4]. To test whether the pMNS might contribute indirectly to the integration process by sending information to brain areas responsible for this integration (integration network), here we used Granger causality mapping (GCM) [5]. We explored the directional information flow between the anterior sites of the pMNS and previously identified integrative brain regions. We found that the left BA44 sent more information than it received to both the integration network (left thalamus, right middle occipital gyrus and cerebellum) and more posterior nodes of the pMNS (BA2). Thus, during joint actions, two anatomically separate networks therefore seem effectively connected and the information flow is predominantly from anterior to posterior areas of the brain. These findings suggest that the pMNS is involved indirectly in joint actions by transforming observed and executed actions into a common code and is part of a generative model that could predict the future somatosensory and visual consequences of observed and executed actions in order to overcome otherwise inevitable neural delays

“Avoiding or approaching eyes”? Introversion/extraversion affects the gaze-cueing effect

We investigated whether the extra-/introversion personality dimension can influence processing of others’ eye gaze direction and emotional facial expression during a target detection task. On the basis of previous evidence showing that self-reported trait anxiety can affect gaze-cueing with emotional faces, we also verified whether trait anxiety can modulate the influence of intro-/extraversion on behavioral performance. Fearful, happy, angry or neutral faces, with either direct or averted gaze, were presented before the target appeared in spatial locations congruent or incongruent with stimuli’s eye gaze direction. Results showed a significant influence of intra-/extraversion dimension on gaze-cueing effect for angry, happy, and neutral faces with averted gaze. Introverts did not show the gaze congruency effect when viewing angry expressions, but did so with happy and neutral faces; extraverts showed the opposite pattern. Importantly, the influence of intro-/extraversion on gaze-cueing was not mediated by trait anxiety. These findings demonstrated that personality differences can shape processing of interactions between relevant social signals

Cisplatin overcomes radiotherapy resistance in OCT4-expressing head and neck squamous cell carcinoma

Objectives: Cisplatin is combined with radiotherapy for advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). While providing a beneficial effect on survival, it also causes side effects and thus is an important target when considering treatment de-escalation. Currently, there are no biomarkers to predict its patient-selective therapeutic utility. In this study, we examined the role of the stem cell factor OCT4 as a potential biomarker to help clinicians stratify HNSCC patients between radiotherapy and chemoradiotherapy.Materials and methods: OCT4 immunohistochemical staining of a population-validated tissue microarray (PV-TMA) (n = 166) representative of a standard HNSCC patients was carried out, and 5-year survival was analyzed. The results were validated using ex vivo drug sensitivity analysis of HNSCC tumor samples, and further cross-validated in independent oropharyngeal (n = 118), nasopharyngeal (n = 170), and vulvar carcinoma (n = 95) clinical datasets. In vitro, genetically modified, patient-derived HNSCC cells were used.Results: OCT4 expression in HNSCC tumors was associated with radioresistance. However, combination therapy with cisplatin was found to overcome thisradioresistance in OCT4-expressing HNSCC tumors. The results were validated by using several independent patient cohorts. Furthermore, CRISPRa-based OCT4 overexpression in the HNSCC cell line resulted in apoptosis resistance, and cisplatin was found to downregulate OCT4 protein expression in vitro. Ex vivo drug sensitivity analysis of HNSCC tumors confirmed the association between OCT4 expression and cisplatin sensitivity.Conclusion: This study introduces OCT4 immunohistochemistry as a simple and cost-effective diagnostic approach for clinical practice to identify HNSCC patients benefitting from radiosensitization by cisplatin using either full or reduced dosing.</p

Adaptation of the Emotional Contagion Scale (ECS) and gender differences within the Greek cultural context

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Dynamic Social Adaptation of Motion-Related Neurons in Primate Parietal Cortex

Social brain function, which allows us to adapt our behavior to social context, is poorly understood at the single-cell level due largely to technical limitations. But the questions involved are vital: How do neurons recognize and modulate their activity in response to social context? To probe the mechanisms involved, we developed a novel recording technique, called multi-dimensional recording, and applied it simultaneously in the left parietal cortices of two monkeys while they shared a common social space. When the monkeys sat near each other but did not interact, each monkey's parietal activity showed robust response preference to action by his own right arm and almost no response to action by the other's arm. But the preference was broken if social conflict emerged between the monkeys—specifically, if both were able to reach for the same food item placed on the table between them. Under these circumstances, parietal neurons started to show complex combinatorial responses to motion of self and other. Parietal cortex adapted its response properties in the social context by discarding and recruiting different neural populations. Our results suggest that parietal neurons can recognize social events in the environment linked with current social context and form part of a larger social brain network

Gaze following is modulated by expectations regarding others’ action goals

Humans attend to social cues in order to understand and predict others' behavior. Facial expressions and gaze direction provide valuable information to infer others' mental states and intentions. The present study examined the mechanism of gaze following in the context of participants' expectations about successive action steps of an observed actor. We embedded a gaze-cueing manipulation within an action scenario consisting of a sequence of naturalistic photographs. Gaze-induced orienting of attention (gaze following) was analyzed with respect to whether the gaze behavior of the observed actor was in line or not with the action-related expectations of participants (i.e., whether the actor gazed at an object that was congruent or incongruent with an overarching action goal). In Experiment 1, participants followed the gaze of the observed agent, though the gaze-cueing effect was larger when the actor looked at an action-congruent object relative to an incongruent object. Experiment 2 examined whether the pattern of effects observed in Experiment 1 was due to covert, rather than overt, attentional orienting, by requiring participants to maintain eye fixation throughout the sequence of critical photographs (corroborated by monitoring eye movements). The essential pattern of results of Experiment 1 was replicated, with the gaze-cueing effect being completely eliminated when the observed agent gazed at an action-incongruent object. Thus, our findings show that covert gaze following can be modulated by expectations that humans hold regarding successive steps of the action performed by an observed agent