In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals' direct gaze has robus... more In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals' direct gaze has robust effects on various attentional and cognitive processes. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to investigating the affective effects triggered by eye contact. This article reviews research concerning the effects of others' gaze direction on observers' affective responses. The review focuses on studies in which affective reactions have been investigated in well-controlled laboratory experiments, and in which contextual factors possibly influencing perceivers' affects have been controlled. Two important themes emerged from this review. First, explicit affective evaluations of seeing another's direct versus averted gaze have resulted in rather inconsistent findings; some studies report more positive subjective feelings to direct compared to averted gaze, whereas others report the opposite pattern. These contradictory findings may be related, for example, to differences between studies in terms of the capability of directgaze stimuli to elicit feelings of self-involvement. Second, studies relying on various implicit measures have reported more consistent results; they indicate that direct gaze increases affective arousal, and more importantly, that eye contact automatically evokes a positively valenced affective reaction. Based on the review, possible psychological mechanisms for the positive affective reactions elicited by eye contact are described.
Facial electromyographic responses and skin conductance responses were measured to investigate wh... more Facial electromyographic responses and skin conductance responses were measured to investigate whether, in a neutral laboratory environment, another individual's direct gaze elicits a positive or negative affective reaction in the observer. The results showed that greater zygomatic responses associated with positive affect were elicited by seeing another person with direct as compared to averted gaze. The zygomatic responses were greater in response to another person's direct gaze both when the participant's own gaze was directed towards the other and when the participant was not looking directly towards the other. Compatible with the zygomatic responses, the corrugator activity (associated with negative affect) was decreased below baseline more in response to another person's direct than averted gaze. Replicating previous research, the skin conductance responses were greater to another person's direct than averted gaze. The results provide evidence that, in a ne...
The present study investigated whether another individual's gaze ... more The present study investigated whether another individual's gaze direction influences an observer's affective responses. In Experiment 1, subjective self-ratings and an affective priming paradigm were employed to examine how participants explicitly and implicitly, respectively, evaluated the affective valence of direct gaze, averted gaze, and closed eyes. The explicit self-ratings showed that participants evaluated closed eyes more positively than direct gaze. However, the implicit priming task showed an inverse pattern of results indicating that direct gaze was automatically evaluated more positively than closed eyes were. Experiment 2 confirmed that the opposite patterns of results between the two tasks were not due to differences in presentation times of the gaze stimuli. The results provide evidence for automatic affective reactions to eye gaze and indicate a dissociation between explicit and implicit affective evaluations of eyes and gaze direction.
Although anterior functional brain asymmetry has been linked to individual differences in affect ... more Although anterior functional brain asymmetry has been linked to individual differences in affect and motivation, its relations with the Five Factor Model personality traits remain unclear. We investigated anterior EEG alpha-activity asymmetry in response to variable degrees of social contact induced by different gaze directions of a "live" model. Neuroticism was negatively related to the anterior EEG asymmetry scores in response to direct gaze, indicating that higher levels of Neuroticism were associated with avoidance-related, relative right-sided functional brain asymmetry. Neuroticism was also related to behavioral direct gaze avoidance and subjective averted gaze preference. These relationships arose primarily from the Withdrawal aspect factor, suggesting that two subdomains of Neuroticism may be differentially related to approach-avoidance tendencies. These findings demonstrate that experimental manipulations of social contact can reveal personality related difference...
This study investigated whether eye contact perception differs in people with different cultural ... more This study investigated whether eye contact perception differs in people with different cultural backgrounds. Finnish (European) and Japanese (East Asian) participants were asked to determine whether Finnish and Japanese neutral faces with various gaze directions were looking at them. Further, participants rated the face stimuli for emotion and other affect-related dimensions. The results indicated that Finnish viewers had a smaller bias toward judging slightly averted gazes as directed at them when judging Finnish rather than Japanese faces, while the bias of Japanese viewers did not differ between faces from their own and other cultural backgrounds. This may be explained by Westerners experiencing more eye contact in their daily life leading to larger visual experience of gaze perception generally, and to more accurate perception of eye contact with people from their own cultural background particularly. The results also revealed cultural differences in the perception of emotion f...
Gaze direction provides important information about social attention, and people tend to reflexiv... more Gaze direction provides important information about social attention, and people tend to reflexively orient in the direction others are gazing. Perceiving the gaze of others relies on the integration of multiple social cues, which include perceptual information related to the eyes, gaze direction, head position, and body orientation of others. Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are characterised by social and emotional deficits, including atypical gaze behaviour. The social-emotional deficits may emerge from a reliance on perceptual information involving details and features, at the expense of more holistic processing, which includes the integration of features. While people with ASC are often able to physically compute gaze direction and show intact reflexive orienting to others' gaze, they show deficits in reading mental states from the eyes. The present study recruited 23 adult males with a diagnosis of ASC and 23 adult males without ASC as a control group. They were tested usi...
Previous studies have shown that cognitive performance can be affected by the presence of an obse... more Previous studies have shown that cognitive performance can be affected by the presence of an observer and self-directed gaze. We investigated whether the effect of gaze direction (direct vs. downcast) on verbal memory is mediated by autonomic arousal. Male participants responded with enhanced affective arousal to both male and female storytellers' direct gaze which, according to a path analysis, was negatively associated with the performance. On the other hand, parallel to this arousal-mediated effect, males' performance was affected by another process impacting the performance positively and suggested to be related to effort allocation on the task. The effect of this process was observed only when the storyteller was a male. The participants remembered more details from a story told by a male with a direct vs. downcast gaze. The effect of gaze direction on performance was the opposite for female storytellers, which was explained by the arousal-mediated process. Surprisingly, these results were restricted to male participants only and no effects of gaze were observed among female participants. We also investigated whether the participants' belief of being seen or not (through an electronic window) by the storyteller influenced the memory and arousal, but this manipulation had no effect on the results.
In this study, we investigated gaze-cued attention orienting when the perceived eyes are not look... more In this study, we investigated gaze-cued attention orienting when the perceived eyes are not looking in the same direction. This condition occurs in strabismus (squint). Participants were asked to detect laterally presented reaction signals preceded by schematic faces in which the direction (left, straight, or right) of the left and right eye was independently manipulated. Consistent with earlier studies, the results showed a reliable cuing effect by two eyes with parallel gaze direction. Gaze-cued orienting was also shown in a situation when one eye was averted and the other eye was looking straight ahead. The gaze cuing was not significantly stronger in the former than in the latter situation. When both eyes were either nasally or temporally averted, no shifts of visual attention were observed. The results suggest that, if both eyes are visible, the direction of both eyes is computed and integrated for the gaze-cued orienting.
In this study we investigated facial electromyographic (EMG) responses to vocal affect expression... more In this study we investigated facial electromyographic (EMG) responses to vocal affect expressions. We also measured emotion-related action tendencies by requesting the subjects to indicate their tendency to approach or withdraw from the person uttering the stimulus word. In addition, emotional contagion (EC) was measured with a questionnaire-based scale. The results showed that hearing the expression of anger increased EMG activity in the subjects' brow region more than hearing contentment. In contrast, the expression of contentment activated the periocular muscle region more than anger. The expressions of anger elicited behavioral withdrawal responses, whereas the neutral expressions and contentment evoked approach responses. Subjects scoring low and high on EC exhibited different patterns of EMG responses. The results support the view that negative and positive affects are contagious from hearing human vocal affect expressions.
An affective priming paradigm with pictures of environmental scenes and facial expressions as pri... more An affective priming paradigm with pictures of environmental scenes and facial expressions as primes and targets, respectively, was employed in order to investigate the role of natural (e.g., vegetation) and built elements (e.g., buildings) in eliciting rapid affective responses. In Experiment 1, images of environmental scenes were digitally manipulated to make continua of priming pictures with a gradual increase of natural elements (and a decrease of built elements). The primes were followed by presentations of facial expressions of happiness and disgust as to-be-recognized target stimuli. The recognition times of happy faces decreased and the recognition times of disgusted faces increased as the quantity of natural/built material present in the primes increased/decreased. The physical changes also influenced the evaluated restorativeness and affective valence of the primes. In Experiment 2, the primes used in Experiment 1 were manipulated in such a way that they were void of any recognizable natural or built elements but contained either similar colours or similar shapes as primes in Experiment 1. This time the results showed no effect of priming. These results were interpreted to give support for a view that the priming effect by environmental pictures is due to the primes representing environmental scenes and not due to the presence of certain low-level colour or shape information in the primes. In all, the present results provide evidence that perception of environmental scenes elicits automatic affective responses and influences recognition of facial expressions.
Subjects were asked to detect visual, laterally presented reaction signals preceded by head-body ... more Subjects were asked to detect visual, laterally presented reaction signals preceded by head-body cue stimuli in a spatial cueing task. A head rotated towards the reaction signal combined with a front view of a body resulted in shorter reaction times in comparison to the front view of a head and body. In contrast, a cue showing the head and body rotated towards the reaction signal did not result in such a facilitation in reaction times. The results suggest that the brain mechanisms involved in social attention orienting integrate ventrally processed visual information from the head and body orientation. A cue signaling that the other person, in his or her frame of reference, has an averted attention direction shifts the observer's own attention in the same direction.
Whole-head neuromagnetic responses were recorded from seven subjects to pictures of faces and to ... more Whole-head neuromagnetic responses were recorded from seven subjects to pictures of faces and to various control stimuli. Four subjects displayed signals specific to faces. The combination of functional information from magnetoencephalography and anatomical data from magnetic resonance images suggests that the face-specific activity was generated in the inferior occipitotemporal cortex. All four subjects showed the face-specific response in the right hemisphere, one of them also in the left. Our results, together with recent positron emission tomography and lesion studies, suggest a right-hemisphere preponderance of face processing in the inferior occipitotemporal cortex.
The McGurk illusion effectively demonstrates the audiovisual nature of speech perception. When an... more The McGurk illusion effectively demonstrates the audiovisual nature of speech perception. When an auditory syllable is dubbed onto an incongruous visual syllable the resulting percept is usually not either of the components, but their combination or fusion. The present experiment investigated the persistence of the McGurk effect when the facial configuration context of the audiovisual stimuli was manipulated. Two congruent and two incongruent audiovisual syllables were created from spoken /ipi/ and /iki/. These audiovisual tokens were uttered by seven facial configurations of five talkers. All facial configurations produced a clear McGurk effect (reported /iti/ for heard /ipi/ + seen /iki/), but the effect was significantly less when uttered by an asymmetrically scrambled face configuration. The results also showed significant differences in the persistence of the McGurk effect between different talkers. In sum, facial configural information can be used in the audiovisual integration of certain speech segments. This information is not necessary for the integration to occur, but the integration process can be disrupted by face stimuli violating the normal configural information.
The aim of the present experiment was to investigate whether response facilitation and interferen... more The aim of the present experiment was to investigate whether response facilitation and interference could be demonstrated in the Simon task by comparing the speed of response to relevant visual stimuli presented at the focus of attention (neutral condition) and to relevant stimuli ...
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2012
The present study investigated whether autonomic arousal to direct gaze is related to social impa... more The present study investigated whether autonomic arousal to direct gaze is related to social impairments among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Arousal was measured through skin conductance responses (SCR) while the participants (15 children with ASD and 16 control children) viewed a live face of another person. Impairments in social skills was assessed with the Developmental, Dimensional and Diagnostic Interview. The level of arousal enhancement to direct gaze in comparison to arousal to faces with averted gaze or closed eyes was positively associated with impairments in social skills (use of language and other social communication skills and use of gesture and non-verbal play) among children with ASD. There was no similar association among children without ASD. The role of arousal-related factors in influencing eye contact behaviour in ASD is discussed.
The present study investigated the effect of stimulus duration on skin conductance responses (SCR... more The present study investigated the effect of stimulus duration on skin conductance responses (SCRs) evoked by different gaze directions of a live person. In two separate parts of the experiment, either two fixed stimulus durations (2 s and 5 s) or a participant-controlled stimulus duration was used. The results showed that the eye contact evoked enhanced SCRs compared to averted gaze or closed eyes conditions irrespective of the presentation time. Subjective evaluations of approach-avoidance-tendencies indicated that the direct gaze elicited either approach or avoidance, depending on the participant. Participants who had evaluated a direct gaze-condition as approachable were found to be more emotionally stabile than those who had evaluated the same condition as avoidable. In the self-timing condition, averted gaze was looked at longer than direct gaze. Our results suggest that direct gaze, also when encountered only briefly like in every-day social encounterings, increases autonomic sympathetic arousal.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2016
Ostracized individuals demonstrate an increased need for belonging. To satisfy this need, they se... more Ostracized individuals demonstrate an increased need for belonging. To satisfy this need, they search for signals of inclusion, one of which may be another person's gaze directed at oneself. We tested if ostracized, compared to included, individuals judge a greater degree of averted gaze as still being direct. This range of gaze angles still viewed as direct has been dubbed "the cone of (direct) gaze". In the current research, ostracized and included participants viewed friendly-looking face stimuli with direct or slightly averted gaze (0°, 2°, 4°, 6°, and 8° to the left and to the right) and judged whether stimulus persons were looking at them or not. Ostracized individuals demonstrated a wider gaze cone than included individuals.
Touching is a powerful means for eliciting sexual arousal. Here, we establish the topographical o... more Touching is a powerful means for eliciting sexual arousal. Here, we establish the topographical organization of bodily regions triggering sexual arousal in humans. A total of 704 participants were shown images of same and opposite sex bodies and asked to color the bodily regions whose touching they or members of the opposite sex would experience as sexually arousing while masturbating or having sex with a partner. Resulting erogenous zone maps (EZMs) revealed that the whole body was sensitive to sexual touching, with erogenous hotspots consisting of genitals, breasts, and anus. The EZM area was larger while having sex with a partner versus while masturbating, and was also dependent on sexual desire and heterosexual and homosexual interest levels. We conclude that tactile stimulation of practically all bodily regions may trigger sexual arousal. Extension of the erogenous zones while having sex with a partner may reflect the role of touching in maintenance of reproductive pair bonds.
In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals' direct gaze has robus... more In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals' direct gaze has robust effects on various attentional and cognitive processes. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to investigating the affective effects triggered by eye contact. This article reviews research concerning the effects of others' gaze direction on observers' affective responses. The review focuses on studies in which affective reactions have been investigated in well-controlled laboratory experiments, and in which contextual factors possibly influencing perceivers' affects have been controlled. Two important themes emerged from this review. First, explicit affective evaluations of seeing another's direct versus averted gaze have resulted in rather inconsistent findings; some studies report more positive subjective feelings to direct compared to averted gaze, whereas others report the opposite pattern. These contradictory findings may be related, for example, to differences between studies in terms of the capability of directgaze stimuli to elicit feelings of self-involvement. Second, studies relying on various implicit measures have reported more consistent results; they indicate that direct gaze increases affective arousal, and more importantly, that eye contact automatically evokes a positively valenced affective reaction. Based on the review, possible psychological mechanisms for the positive affective reactions elicited by eye contact are described.
Facial electromyographic responses and skin conductance responses were measured to investigate wh... more Facial electromyographic responses and skin conductance responses were measured to investigate whether, in a neutral laboratory environment, another individual's direct gaze elicits a positive or negative affective reaction in the observer. The results showed that greater zygomatic responses associated with positive affect were elicited by seeing another person with direct as compared to averted gaze. The zygomatic responses were greater in response to another person's direct gaze both when the participant's own gaze was directed towards the other and when the participant was not looking directly towards the other. Compatible with the zygomatic responses, the corrugator activity (associated with negative affect) was decreased below baseline more in response to another person's direct than averted gaze. Replicating previous research, the skin conductance responses were greater to another person's direct than averted gaze. The results provide evidence that, in a ne...
The present study investigated whether another individual's gaze ... more The present study investigated whether another individual's gaze direction influences an observer's affective responses. In Experiment 1, subjective self-ratings and an affective priming paradigm were employed to examine how participants explicitly and implicitly, respectively, evaluated the affective valence of direct gaze, averted gaze, and closed eyes. The explicit self-ratings showed that participants evaluated closed eyes more positively than direct gaze. However, the implicit priming task showed an inverse pattern of results indicating that direct gaze was automatically evaluated more positively than closed eyes were. Experiment 2 confirmed that the opposite patterns of results between the two tasks were not due to differences in presentation times of the gaze stimuli. The results provide evidence for automatic affective reactions to eye gaze and indicate a dissociation between explicit and implicit affective evaluations of eyes and gaze direction.
Although anterior functional brain asymmetry has been linked to individual differences in affect ... more Although anterior functional brain asymmetry has been linked to individual differences in affect and motivation, its relations with the Five Factor Model personality traits remain unclear. We investigated anterior EEG alpha-activity asymmetry in response to variable degrees of social contact induced by different gaze directions of a "live" model. Neuroticism was negatively related to the anterior EEG asymmetry scores in response to direct gaze, indicating that higher levels of Neuroticism were associated with avoidance-related, relative right-sided functional brain asymmetry. Neuroticism was also related to behavioral direct gaze avoidance and subjective averted gaze preference. These relationships arose primarily from the Withdrawal aspect factor, suggesting that two subdomains of Neuroticism may be differentially related to approach-avoidance tendencies. These findings demonstrate that experimental manipulations of social contact can reveal personality related difference...
This study investigated whether eye contact perception differs in people with different cultural ... more This study investigated whether eye contact perception differs in people with different cultural backgrounds. Finnish (European) and Japanese (East Asian) participants were asked to determine whether Finnish and Japanese neutral faces with various gaze directions were looking at them. Further, participants rated the face stimuli for emotion and other affect-related dimensions. The results indicated that Finnish viewers had a smaller bias toward judging slightly averted gazes as directed at them when judging Finnish rather than Japanese faces, while the bias of Japanese viewers did not differ between faces from their own and other cultural backgrounds. This may be explained by Westerners experiencing more eye contact in their daily life leading to larger visual experience of gaze perception generally, and to more accurate perception of eye contact with people from their own cultural background particularly. The results also revealed cultural differences in the perception of emotion f...
Gaze direction provides important information about social attention, and people tend to reflexiv... more Gaze direction provides important information about social attention, and people tend to reflexively orient in the direction others are gazing. Perceiving the gaze of others relies on the integration of multiple social cues, which include perceptual information related to the eyes, gaze direction, head position, and body orientation of others. Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are characterised by social and emotional deficits, including atypical gaze behaviour. The social-emotional deficits may emerge from a reliance on perceptual information involving details and features, at the expense of more holistic processing, which includes the integration of features. While people with ASC are often able to physically compute gaze direction and show intact reflexive orienting to others' gaze, they show deficits in reading mental states from the eyes. The present study recruited 23 adult males with a diagnosis of ASC and 23 adult males without ASC as a control group. They were tested usi...
Previous studies have shown that cognitive performance can be affected by the presence of an obse... more Previous studies have shown that cognitive performance can be affected by the presence of an observer and self-directed gaze. We investigated whether the effect of gaze direction (direct vs. downcast) on verbal memory is mediated by autonomic arousal. Male participants responded with enhanced affective arousal to both male and female storytellers' direct gaze which, according to a path analysis, was negatively associated with the performance. On the other hand, parallel to this arousal-mediated effect, males' performance was affected by another process impacting the performance positively and suggested to be related to effort allocation on the task. The effect of this process was observed only when the storyteller was a male. The participants remembered more details from a story told by a male with a direct vs. downcast gaze. The effect of gaze direction on performance was the opposite for female storytellers, which was explained by the arousal-mediated process. Surprisingly, these results were restricted to male participants only and no effects of gaze were observed among female participants. We also investigated whether the participants' belief of being seen or not (through an electronic window) by the storyteller influenced the memory and arousal, but this manipulation had no effect on the results.
In this study, we investigated gaze-cued attention orienting when the perceived eyes are not look... more In this study, we investigated gaze-cued attention orienting when the perceived eyes are not looking in the same direction. This condition occurs in strabismus (squint). Participants were asked to detect laterally presented reaction signals preceded by schematic faces in which the direction (left, straight, or right) of the left and right eye was independently manipulated. Consistent with earlier studies, the results showed a reliable cuing effect by two eyes with parallel gaze direction. Gaze-cued orienting was also shown in a situation when one eye was averted and the other eye was looking straight ahead. The gaze cuing was not significantly stronger in the former than in the latter situation. When both eyes were either nasally or temporally averted, no shifts of visual attention were observed. The results suggest that, if both eyes are visible, the direction of both eyes is computed and integrated for the gaze-cued orienting.
In this study we investigated facial electromyographic (EMG) responses to vocal affect expression... more In this study we investigated facial electromyographic (EMG) responses to vocal affect expressions. We also measured emotion-related action tendencies by requesting the subjects to indicate their tendency to approach or withdraw from the person uttering the stimulus word. In addition, emotional contagion (EC) was measured with a questionnaire-based scale. The results showed that hearing the expression of anger increased EMG activity in the subjects' brow region more than hearing contentment. In contrast, the expression of contentment activated the periocular muscle region more than anger. The expressions of anger elicited behavioral withdrawal responses, whereas the neutral expressions and contentment evoked approach responses. Subjects scoring low and high on EC exhibited different patterns of EMG responses. The results support the view that negative and positive affects are contagious from hearing human vocal affect expressions.
An affective priming paradigm with pictures of environmental scenes and facial expressions as pri... more An affective priming paradigm with pictures of environmental scenes and facial expressions as primes and targets, respectively, was employed in order to investigate the role of natural (e.g., vegetation) and built elements (e.g., buildings) in eliciting rapid affective responses. In Experiment 1, images of environmental scenes were digitally manipulated to make continua of priming pictures with a gradual increase of natural elements (and a decrease of built elements). The primes were followed by presentations of facial expressions of happiness and disgust as to-be-recognized target stimuli. The recognition times of happy faces decreased and the recognition times of disgusted faces increased as the quantity of natural/built material present in the primes increased/decreased. The physical changes also influenced the evaluated restorativeness and affective valence of the primes. In Experiment 2, the primes used in Experiment 1 were manipulated in such a way that they were void of any recognizable natural or built elements but contained either similar colours or similar shapes as primes in Experiment 1. This time the results showed no effect of priming. These results were interpreted to give support for a view that the priming effect by environmental pictures is due to the primes representing environmental scenes and not due to the presence of certain low-level colour or shape information in the primes. In all, the present results provide evidence that perception of environmental scenes elicits automatic affective responses and influences recognition of facial expressions.
Subjects were asked to detect visual, laterally presented reaction signals preceded by head-body ... more Subjects were asked to detect visual, laterally presented reaction signals preceded by head-body cue stimuli in a spatial cueing task. A head rotated towards the reaction signal combined with a front view of a body resulted in shorter reaction times in comparison to the front view of a head and body. In contrast, a cue showing the head and body rotated towards the reaction signal did not result in such a facilitation in reaction times. The results suggest that the brain mechanisms involved in social attention orienting integrate ventrally processed visual information from the head and body orientation. A cue signaling that the other person, in his or her frame of reference, has an averted attention direction shifts the observer's own attention in the same direction.
Whole-head neuromagnetic responses were recorded from seven subjects to pictures of faces and to ... more Whole-head neuromagnetic responses were recorded from seven subjects to pictures of faces and to various control stimuli. Four subjects displayed signals specific to faces. The combination of functional information from magnetoencephalography and anatomical data from magnetic resonance images suggests that the face-specific activity was generated in the inferior occipitotemporal cortex. All four subjects showed the face-specific response in the right hemisphere, one of them also in the left. Our results, together with recent positron emission tomography and lesion studies, suggest a right-hemisphere preponderance of face processing in the inferior occipitotemporal cortex.
The McGurk illusion effectively demonstrates the audiovisual nature of speech perception. When an... more The McGurk illusion effectively demonstrates the audiovisual nature of speech perception. When an auditory syllable is dubbed onto an incongruous visual syllable the resulting percept is usually not either of the components, but their combination or fusion. The present experiment investigated the persistence of the McGurk effect when the facial configuration context of the audiovisual stimuli was manipulated. Two congruent and two incongruent audiovisual syllables were created from spoken /ipi/ and /iki/. These audiovisual tokens were uttered by seven facial configurations of five talkers. All facial configurations produced a clear McGurk effect (reported /iti/ for heard /ipi/ + seen /iki/), but the effect was significantly less when uttered by an asymmetrically scrambled face configuration. The results also showed significant differences in the persistence of the McGurk effect between different talkers. In sum, facial configural information can be used in the audiovisual integration of certain speech segments. This information is not necessary for the integration to occur, but the integration process can be disrupted by face stimuli violating the normal configural information.
The aim of the present experiment was to investigate whether response facilitation and interferen... more The aim of the present experiment was to investigate whether response facilitation and interference could be demonstrated in the Simon task by comparing the speed of response to relevant visual stimuli presented at the focus of attention (neutral condition) and to relevant stimuli ...
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2012
The present study investigated whether autonomic arousal to direct gaze is related to social impa... more The present study investigated whether autonomic arousal to direct gaze is related to social impairments among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Arousal was measured through skin conductance responses (SCR) while the participants (15 children with ASD and 16 control children) viewed a live face of another person. Impairments in social skills was assessed with the Developmental, Dimensional and Diagnostic Interview. The level of arousal enhancement to direct gaze in comparison to arousal to faces with averted gaze or closed eyes was positively associated with impairments in social skills (use of language and other social communication skills and use of gesture and non-verbal play) among children with ASD. There was no similar association among children without ASD. The role of arousal-related factors in influencing eye contact behaviour in ASD is discussed.
The present study investigated the effect of stimulus duration on skin conductance responses (SCR... more The present study investigated the effect of stimulus duration on skin conductance responses (SCRs) evoked by different gaze directions of a live person. In two separate parts of the experiment, either two fixed stimulus durations (2 s and 5 s) or a participant-controlled stimulus duration was used. The results showed that the eye contact evoked enhanced SCRs compared to averted gaze or closed eyes conditions irrespective of the presentation time. Subjective evaluations of approach-avoidance-tendencies indicated that the direct gaze elicited either approach or avoidance, depending on the participant. Participants who had evaluated a direct gaze-condition as approachable were found to be more emotionally stabile than those who had evaluated the same condition as avoidable. In the self-timing condition, averted gaze was looked at longer than direct gaze. Our results suggest that direct gaze, also when encountered only briefly like in every-day social encounterings, increases autonomic sympathetic arousal.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2016
Ostracized individuals demonstrate an increased need for belonging. To satisfy this need, they se... more Ostracized individuals demonstrate an increased need for belonging. To satisfy this need, they search for signals of inclusion, one of which may be another person's gaze directed at oneself. We tested if ostracized, compared to included, individuals judge a greater degree of averted gaze as still being direct. This range of gaze angles still viewed as direct has been dubbed "the cone of (direct) gaze". In the current research, ostracized and included participants viewed friendly-looking face stimuli with direct or slightly averted gaze (0°, 2°, 4°, 6°, and 8° to the left and to the right) and judged whether stimulus persons were looking at them or not. Ostracized individuals demonstrated a wider gaze cone than included individuals.
Touching is a powerful means for eliciting sexual arousal. Here, we establish the topographical o... more Touching is a powerful means for eliciting sexual arousal. Here, we establish the topographical organization of bodily regions triggering sexual arousal in humans. A total of 704 participants were shown images of same and opposite sex bodies and asked to color the bodily regions whose touching they or members of the opposite sex would experience as sexually arousing while masturbating or having sex with a partner. Resulting erogenous zone maps (EZMs) revealed that the whole body was sensitive to sexual touching, with erogenous hotspots consisting of genitals, breasts, and anus. The EZM area was larger while having sex with a partner versus while masturbating, and was also dependent on sexual desire and heterosexual and homosexual interest levels. We conclude that tactile stimulation of practically all bodily regions may trigger sexual arousal. Extension of the erogenous zones while having sex with a partner may reflect the role of touching in maintenance of reproductive pair bonds.
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