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Can we resist another person's gaze?

ABSTRACT: Adaptive adjustments of strategies are needed to optimize behavior in a dynamic and uncertain world. A key function in implementing flexible behavior and exerting self-control is represented by the ability to stop the execution of an action when it is no longer appropriate for the environmental requests. Importantly, stimuli in our environment are not equally relevant and some are more valuable than others. One example is the gaze of other people, which is known to convey important social information about their direction of attention and their emotional and mental states. Indeed, gaze direction has a significant impact on the execution of voluntary saccades of an observer since it is capable of inducing in the observer an automatic gaze-following behavior: a phenomenon named social or joint attention. Nevertheless, people can exert volitional inhibitory control on saccadic eye movements during their planning. Little is known about the interaction between gaze direction signals and volitional inhibition of saccades. To fill this gap, we administered a countermanding task to 15 healthy participants in which they were asked to observe the eye region of a face with the eyes shut appearing at central fixation. In one condition, participants were required to suppress a saccade, that was previously instructed by a gaze shift toward one of two peripheral targets, when the eyes were suddenly shut down (social condition, SC). In a second condition, participants were asked to inhibit a saccade, that was previously instructed by a change in color of one of the two same targets, when a change of color of a central picture occurred (non-social condition, N-SC). We found that inhibitory control was more impaired in the SC, suggesting that actions initiated and stopped by social cues conveyed by the eyes are more difficult to withhold. This is probably due to the social value intrinsically linked to these cues and the many uses we make of them.

SUBMITTER: Marino BF

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4623777 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Can we resist another person's gaze?

Marino Barbara F M BF Mirabella Giovanni G Actis-Grosso Rossana R Bricolo Emanuela E Ricciardelli Paola P

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience 20150930

Adaptive adjustments of strategies are needed to optimize behavior in a dynamic and uncertain world. A key function in implementing flexible behavior and exerting self-control is represented by the ability to stop the execution of an action when it is no longer appropriate for the environmental requests. Importantly, stimuli in our environment are not equally relevant and some are more valuable than others. One example is the gaze of other people, which is known to convey important social inform ...[more]

PMID: 26550008

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Project description:Crying is an ubiquitous human behavior through which an emotion is expressed on the face together with visible tears and constitutes a slippery riddle for researchers. To provide an answer to the question "How our gaze reacts to another person's tears?," we made use of eye tracking technology to study a series of visual stimuli. By presenting an illustrative example through an experimental setting specifically designed to study the "tearing effect," the present work aims to offer methodological insight on how to use eye-tracking technology to study non-verbal cues. A sample of 30 healthy young women with normal visual acuity performed a within-subjects task in which they evaluated images of real faces with and without tears while their eye movements were tracked. Tears were found to be a magnet for visual attention in the task of facial attribution, facilitating a greater perception of emotional intensity. Moreover, the inspection pattern changed qualitatively and quantitatively, with our participants becoming fully focused on the tears when they were visible. The mere presence of a single tear running down a cheek was associated with an increased emotional inference and greater perception of sincerity. Using normalized and validated tools (Reading the Eyes in the Mind Test and the SALAMANCA screening test for personality disorders), we measured the influence of certain characteristics of the participants on their performance of the experimental task. On the one hand, a higher level of cognitive empathy helped to classify tearful faces with higher emotional intensity and tearless faces with less emotional intensity. On the other hand, we observed that less sincerity was attributed to the tearful faces as the SALAMANCA test scores rose in clusters A (strange and extravagant) and B (immature and emotionally unstable) of our sample. The present findings highlight the advantages of using eye tracking technology to study non-verbal cues and draw attention to methodological issues that should be taken into account. Further exploration of the relationship between empathy and tear perception could be a fruitful avenue of future research using eye tracking.

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Can we resist another person's gaze?

Publications

Can we resist another person's gaze?

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