When seeing is more than looking:Intentional gaze modulates object desirability

Objects in the environment have a perceived value that can be changed through social influence. A subtle way to influence object evaluation is through eye gaze: Objects looked at by others are perceived as more likable than objects that are not looked at. In 3 experiments, we directly tested the hypothesis that this liking effect depends on the processing of the intentional relation between other's eye gaze and the object being looked at. To this end, we used a novel paradigm in which participants observed a face looking left or right behind an opaque barrier. Under all tested conditions, we found a gaze cueing effect on attention: Looked-at objects were categorized faster than looked-away objects. In contrast, observed gaze only led to a boost in affective evaluation for the target object when observers had the impression that the face could see the object behind the barrier, but not when observers had the impression that the face could not see the object. These findings indicate that observers make a sophisticated use of social gaze cues in the affective evaluation of objects: Objects looked at by others are liked more than objects looked away but only when others can see the objects

Susceptibility to emotional contagion for negative emotions improves detection of smile authenticity

A smile is a context-dependent emotional expression. A smiling face can signal the experience of enjoyable emotions, but people can also smile to convince another person that enjoyment is occurring when it is not. For this reason, the ability to discriminate between felt and faked enjoyment expressions is a crucial social skill. Despite its importance, adults show remarkable individual variation in this ability. Revealing the factors responsible for these huge individual differences is a key challenge in this domain. Here we investigated, on a large sample of participants, whether individual differences in smile authenticity recognition are accounted for by differences in the predisposition to experience other people's emotions, i.e., by susceptibility to emotional contagion. Results showed that susceptibility to emotional contagion for negative emotions increased smile authenticity detection, while susceptibility to emotional contagion for positive emotions worsened detection performance, because it leaded to categorize most of the faked smiles as sincere. These findings suggest that susceptibility to emotional contagion plays a key role in complex emotion recognition, and point out the importance of analyzing the tendency to experience other people's positive and negative emotions as separate abilities

Communicative Interactions Improve Visual Detection of Biological Motion

BACKGROUND: In the context of interacting activities requiring close-body contact such as fighting or dancing, the actions of one agent can be used to predict the actions of the second agent. In the present study, we investigated whether interpersonal predictive coding extends to interactive activities--such as communicative interactions--in which no physical contingency is implied between the movements of the interacting individuals. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants observed point-light displays of two agents (A and B) performing separate actions. In the communicative condition, the action performed by agent B responded to a communicative gesture performed by agent A. In the individual condition, agent A's communicative action was substituted with a non-communicative action. Using a simultaneous masking detection task, we demonstrate that observing the communicative gesture performed by agent A enhanced visual discrimination of agent B. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our finding complements and extends previous evidence for interpersonal predictive coding, suggesting that the communicative gestures of one agent can serve as a predictor for the expected actions of the respondent, even if no physical contact between agents is implied

Potential for social involvement modulates activity within the mirror and the mentalizing systems

Processing biological motion is fundamental for everyday life activities, such as social interaction, motor learning and nonverbal communication. The ability to detect the nature of a motor pattern has been investigated by means of point-light displays (PLD), sets of moving light points reproducing human kinematics, easily recognizable as meaningful once in motion. Although PLD are rudimentary, the human brain can decipher their content including social intentions. Neuroimaging studies suggest that inferring the social meaning conveyed by PLD could rely on both the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) and the Mentalizing System (MS), but their specific role to this endeavor remains uncertain. We describe a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment in which participants had to judge whether visually presented PLD and videoclips of human-like walkers (HL) were facing towards or away from them. Results show that coding for stimulus direction specifically engages the MNS when considering PLD moving away from the observer, while the nature of the stimulus reveals a dissociation between MNS -mainly involved in coding for PLD- and MS, recruited by HL moving away. These results suggest that the contribution of the two systems can be modulated by the nature of the observed stimulus and its potential for social involvement

Individual Differences in the Recognition of Enjoyment Smiles: No Role for Perceptual–Attentional Factors and Autistic-Like Traits

Adults show remarkable individual variation in the ability to detect felt enjoyment in smiles based on the Duchenne marker (Action Unit 6). It has been hypothesized that perceptual and attentional factors (possibly correlated to autistic-like personality traits in the normative range) play a major role in determining individual differences in recognition performance. Here, this hypothesis was tested in a sample of 100 young adults. Eye-tracking methodology was employed to assess patterns of visual attention during a smile recognition task. Results indicate that neither perceptual–attentional factors nor autistic-like personality traits contribute appreciably to individual differences in smile recognition

Grasping intentions: from thought experiments to empirical evidence

Skepticism has been expressed concerning the possibility to understand others' intentions by simply observing their movements: since a number of different intentions may have produced a particular action, motor information—it has been argued—might be sufficient to understand what an agent is doing, but not her remote goal in performing that action. Here we challenge this conclusion by showing that in the absence of contextual information, intentions can be inferred from body movement. Based on recent empirical findings, we shall contend that: (1) intentions translate into differential kinematic patterns; (2) observers are especially attuned to kinematic information and can use early differences in visual kinematics to anticipate the intention of an agent in performing a given action; (3) during interacting activities, predictions about the future course of others' actions tune online action planning; (4) motor activation during action observation subtends a complementary understanding of what the other is doing. These findings demonstrate that intention understanding is deeply rooted in social interaction: by simply observing others' movements, we might know what they have in mind to do and how we should act in response