Empathizing-Systemizing Theory

Peer reviewe

The influence of banner advertisements on attention and memory: human faces with averted gaze can enhance advertising effectiveness

Research suggests that banner advertisements used in online marketing are often overlooked, especially when positioned horizontally on webpages. Such inattention invariably gives rise to an inability to remember advertising brands and messages, undermining the effectiveness of this marketing method. Recent interest has focused on whether human faces within banner advertisements can increase attention to the information they contain, since the gaze cues conveyed by faces can influence where observers look. We report an experiment that investigated the efficacy of faces located in banner advertisements to enhance the attentional processing and memorability of banner contents. We tracked participants’ eye movements when they examined webpages containing either bottom-right vertical banners or bottom-centre horizontal banners. We also manipulated facial information such that banners either contained no face, a face with mutual gaze or a face with averted gaze. We additionally assessed people’s memories for brands and advertising messages. Results indicated that relative to other conditions, the condition involving faces with averted gaze increased attention to the banner overall, as well as to the advertising text and product. Memorability of the brand and advertising message was also enhanced. Conversely, in the condition involving faces with mutual gaze, the focus of attention was localised more on the face region rather than on the text or product, weakening any memory benefits for the brand and advertising message. This detrimental impact of mutual gaze on attention to advertised products was especially marked for vertical banners. These results demonstrate that the inclusion of human faces with averted gaze in banner advertisements provides a promising means for marketers to increase the attention paid to such adverts, thereby enhancing memory for advertising information

Detail-oriented cognitive style and social communicative deficits, within and beyond the autism spectrum: independent traits that grow into developmental interdependence

At the heart of debates over underlying causes of autism is the "Kanner hypothesis" that autistic deficits in social reciprocity, and a cognitive/perceptual 'style' favouring detail-oriented cognition, co-vary in autistic individuals. A separate line of work indicates these two domains are normally distributed throughout the population, with autism representing an extremity. This realisation brings the Kanner debate into the realm of normative co-variation, providing more ways to test the hypothesis, and insights into typical development; for instance, in the context of normative functioning, the Kanner hypothesis implies social costs to spatial/numerical prowess

Visual attention in autism families: ‘unaffected’ sibs share atypical frontal activation

Background: In addition to their more clinically evident abnormalities of social cognition, people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) manifest perturbations of attention and sensory perception which may offer insights into the underlying neural abnormalities. Similar autistic traits in ASC relatives without a diagnosis suggest a continuity between clinically affected and unaffected family members

Sex differences in the brain: implications for explaining autism

‘Empathizing’ is the capacity to predict and to respond to the behavior of agents (usually people) by inferring their mental states and responding to these with an appropriate emotion. ‘Systemizing’ is the capacity to predict and to respond to the behavior of non-agentive, deterministic systems, by analyzing input-operation-output relations and inferring the rules that govern such systems. At a population level, females are stronger empathizers and males stronger systemizers. The ‘extreme male brain’ theory posits that autism represents an extreme of the male pattern (impaired empathizing and enhanced systemizing). Here we suggest that specific aspects of autistic neuropathology may also be extremes of typical male neuroanatomy

Impaired recognition of social emotions following amygdala damage

Lesion, functional imaging, and single-unit studies in human and nonhuman animals have demonstrated a role for the amygdala in processing stimuli with emotional and social significance. We investigated the recognition of a wide variety of facial expressions, including basic emotions (e.g., happiness, anger) and social emotions (e.g., guilt, admiration, flirtatiousness). Prior findings with a standardized set of stimuli indicated that recognition of social emotions can be signaled by the eye region of the face and is disproportionately impaired in autism (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & Jolliffe, 1997). To test the hypothesis that the recognition of social emotions depends on the amygdala, we administered the same stimuli to 30 subjects with unilateral amygdala damage (16 left, 14 right), 2 with bilateral amygdala damage, 47 brain-damaged controls, and 19 normal controls. Compared with controls, subjects with unilateral or bilateral amygdala damage were impaired when recognizing social emotions; moreover, they were more impaired in recognition of social emotions than in recognition of basic emotions, and, like previously described patients with autism, they were impaired also when asked to recognize social emotions from the eye region of the face alone. The findings suggest that the human amygdala is relatively specialized to process stimuli with complex social significance. The results also provide further support for the idea that some of the impairments in social cognition seen in patients with autism may result from dysfunction of the amygdala

Empathising and systemising in adolescents with gender dysphoria

Background: Recent studies have highlighted the co-occurrence of gender dysphoria (GD) in adolescence and Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC). Systemising and empathising are two psychological dimensions linked to ASC. People with ASC score below average on the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and average or above average on the Systemising Quotient (SQ). Based on the results of previous studies we predicted that if the young people with GD shared aspects of the ‘broader autism phenotype’, their EQ would be lower, and their SQ would be the same or higher, compared to controls of their natal gender. Methods: This preliminary study examined systemising and empathising in adolescents with GD using parent report questionnaires. 35 parents of adolescents with GD aged 12-18 attending the Gender Identity Development Service (London) took part. Parents of 156 typically developing adolescents aged 12-18 were used as a control group. The parents were asked to complete the Adolescent EQ and SQ. Results: The mean EQ score of both the female-to-male, and male-to-female GD group was found to be significantly lower than typically developing females, but similar to that of control males. There was no significant difference on the SQ between the gender dysphoric groups and either female or male controls. Conclusion: This study shows that on average adolescents with GD, specifically those who are female-to-male, have lower empathy than controls. For this group of adolescents it may be helpful to offer psychological interventions that improve their communication skills and their ability to take on board other people’s views, to support their development. This may enable them to make better informed decisions regarding treatment and physical intervention options during adolescence and beyond

Predictive gaze cues and personality judgements: Should eye trust you?

Although following another person’s gaze is essential in fluent social interactions, the reflexive nature of this gaze-cuing effect means that gaze can be used to deceive. In a gaze-cuing procedure, participants were presented with several faces that looked to the left or right. Some faces always looked to the target (predictive-valid), some never looked to the target (predictive-invalid), and others looked toward and away from the target in equal proportions (nonpredictive). The standard gaze-cuing effects appeared to be unaffected by these contingencies. Nevertheless, participants tended to choose the predictive valid faces as appearing more trustworthy than the predictive-invalid faces. This effect was negatively related to scores on a scale assessing autistic-like traits. Further, we present tentative evidence that the ‘‘deceptive’’ faces were encoded more strongly in memory than the "cooperative" faces. These data demonstrate the important interactions among attention, gaze perception, facial identity recognition, and personality judgments