Impact of perceived interpersonal similarity on attention to the eyes of same-race and other-race faces
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Kawakami K
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8563912 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Paying attention to others' faces and eyes is a cornerstone of human social behavior. The µ-opioid receptor (MOR) system, central to social reward-processing in rodents and primates, has been proposed to mediate the capacity for affiliative reward in humans. We assessed the role of the human MOR system in visual exploration of faces and eyes of conspecifics. Thirty healthy males received a novel, bidirectional battery of psychopharmacological treatment (an MOR agonist, a non-selective opioid antagonist, or placebo, on three separate days). Eye-movements were recorded while participants viewed facial photographs. We predicted that the MOR system would promote visual exploration of faces, and hypothesized that MOR agonism would increase, whereas antagonism decrease overt attention to the information-rich eye region. The expected linear effect of MOR manipulation on visual attention to the stimuli was observed, such that MOR agonism increased while antagonism decreased visual exploration of faces and overt attention to the eyes. The observed effects suggest that the human MOR system promotes overt visual attention to socially significant cues, in line with theories linking reward value to gaze control and target selection. Enhanced attention to others' faces and eyes represents a putative behavioral mechanism through which the human MOR system promotes social interest.
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Project description:People understand others' emotions quickly from their facial expressions. However, facial expressions of ingroup and outgroup members may signal different social information and thus be mediated by distinct neural activities. We investigated whether there are distinct neuronal responses to fearful and happy expressions of same-race (SR) and other-race (OR) faces. We recorded electroencephalogram from Chinese adults when viewing an adaptor face (with fearful/neutral expressions in Experiment 1 but happy/neutral expressions in Experiment 2) and a target face (with fearful expressions in Experiment 1 but happy expressions in Experiment 2) presented in rapid succession. We found that both fearful and happy (vs neutral) adaptor faces increased the amplitude of a frontocentral positivity (P2). However, a fearful but not happy (vs neutral) adaptor face decreased the P2 amplitudes to target faces, and this repetition suppression (RS) effect occurred when adaptor and target faces were of the same race but not when of different races. RS was observed on two late parietal/central positive activities to fearful/happy target faces, which, however, occurred regardless of whether adaptor and target faces were of the same or different races. Our findings suggest that early affective processing of fearful expressions may engage distinct neural activities for SR and OR faces.
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Project description:Own-race faces are recognized more effectively than other-race faces. This phenomenon is referred to as other-race effect (ORE). Existing behavioral evidence suggests that one of the possible causes of ORE is that own-race faces are processed more holistically than other-race faces. However, little is known about whether such differences in processing also produce distinctive neural responses in the cortical face processing network. To bridge this gap, the present study used fMRI methodology and the composite face paradigm to examine the response patterns of the traditional face-preferential cortical areas (i.e., the bilateral fusiform face areas [FFA] and the bilateral occipital face areas [OFA]) elicited by own-race faces and other-race faces. We found that the right FFA exhibited a neural composite face effect only for own-race faces but not for other-race faces, even with the absence of the race-related difference in behavior composite face effect. These findings suggest that the right FFA plays a greater role in holistic processing of individual own-race faces than other-race faces. They also suggest that the neural composite effect observed in the right FFA is not the exact neural counterpart of the behavioral face composite effect. The findings of the present study revealed that, along the pathway of the bottom-up face processing, own-race faces and other-race faces presented the holistic processing difference as early as when they were processed in the right FFA.
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Project description:Autistic traits are known to be associated with social interaction difficulties. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, relevant research has been typically restricted to studying individuals. In line with the 'dialectical misattunement hypothesis' and clinical insights of intact social interactions among autistic individuals, we hypothesized that friendship quality varies as a function of interpersonal similarity and more concretely the difference value of autistic traits in a dyad, above and beyond autistic traits per se. Therefore, in this study, we used self-report questionnaires to investigate these measures in a sample of 67 neurotypical dyads across a broad range of autistic traits. Our results demonstrate that the more similar two persons are in autistic traits, the higher is the perceived quality of their friendship, irrespective of friendship duration, age, sex and, importantly, the (average of) autistic traits in a given dyad. More specifically, higher interpersonal similarity of autistic traits was associated with higher measures of closeness, acceptance and help. These results, therefore, lend support to the idea of an interactive turn in the study of social abilities across the autism spectrum and pave the way for future studies on the multiscale dynamics of social interactions.
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Project description:Our reactions to facial self-resemblance could reflect either specialized responses to cues of kinship or by-products of the general perceptual mechanisms of face encoding and mere exposure. The adaptive hypothesis predicts differences in reactions to self-resemblance in mating and prosocial contexts, while the by-product hypothesis does not. Using face images that were digitally transformed to resemble participants, I showed that the effects of resemblance on attractiveness judgements depended on both the sex of the judge and the sex of the face being judged: facial resemblance increased attractiveness judgements of same-sex faces more than other-sex faces, despite the use of identical procedures to manipulate resemblance. A control experiment indicated these effects were caused neither by lower resemblance of other-sex faces than same-sex faces, nor by an increased perception of averageness or familiarity of same-sex faces due to prototyping or mere exposure affecting only same-sex faces. The differential impact of self-resemblance on our perception of same-sex and other-sex faces supports the hypothesis that humans use facial resemblance as a cue of kinship.
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Project description:Past research has shown that position in a social hierarchy modulates one's social attention, as in the gaze cueing effect. While studies have manipulated the social status of others with whom the participants interact, we believe that a sense of one's own social power is also a crucial factor affecting gaze following. In two experiments, we primed the social power of participants, using different approaches, to investigate the participants' performance in a subsequent gaze cueing task. The results of Experiment 1 showed a stronger gaze cueing effect among participants who were primed with low social power, compared to those primed with high social power. Our predicted gender difference (i.e., women showing a stronger gaze cueing effect than men) was confirmed and this effect was found to be dominated by the lower social power condition. Experiment 2 manipulated the level of danger in the context and replicated the joint impact of gender and one's perceived social power on gaze cueing effect, especially in the low danger context, in comparison to the high danger context. These findings demonstrate that one's perceived social power has a concerted effect on social attention evoked by gaze, along with other factors such as gender and characteristics of the environment, and suggest the importance of further research on the complex relationship between an individual's position in the social hierarchy and social attention.
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