Overt and covert attention to emotional faces in realistic social situations

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Louisa Kulke
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441983379

Other people’s faces provide useful information and considering their emotional expression can facilitate social interactions. Numerous laboratory studies show that people preferentially look at faces compared to any other object, when presented with them on a computer screen, particularly if they show an emotional expression. In contrast, once people find themselves in a social situation, they tend to inhibit their gaze towards other people, possibly to avoid awkward interactions. Therefore, attention shifts with and without eye-movements need to be considered to fully understand how emotional information is extracted from faces in real-life social situations. However, so far it remains unclear whether attention is still shifted to faces covertly, without eye-movements, in social situations. It further remains unclear, which effects emotional facial expressions have on gaze behaviour. The current project aims to fill these research gaps. 1) Firstly, it will investigate whether emotional expressions, in contrast to neutral faces, affect looking behaviour in social situations. Our preliminary studies show that eye-tracking glasses can be used to investigate gaze behaviour in real-world situations. Study 1 will use these glasses to measure eye-movements of participants to a confederate that shows either a neutral, positive or negative facial expression. This study will show how emotional expressions affect gaze in real-life situations. 2) Secondly, shifts of attention to faces are possible even without gaze shifts (covert attention shifts). In preliminary studies we showed that combined Electroencephalography and eye-tracking can be used to disentangle the neural mechanisms of open and covert attention shifts. In study 2 of the project, this method will be used to investigate open and covert shifts to emotional faces. This method makes it possible to simultaneously measure whether participants are looking at other people and whether their brain preferentially reacts to them, even if no eye-movement occurs. 3) In a third study, the method will be applied to a realistic social situation. It will be measured whether attention is shifted covertly even if no eye-movement is made when participants find themselves in situations where social interaction is either possible or not. In all studies, modulations of effects due to natural variations in autistic traits and social anxiety will be measured in a population of typical adults. The project will identify mechanisms of attention shifts to emotional faces depending on the sociability of a situation. It will have important implications for everyday social interactions and populations in which these are impaired, for example people with autism or social anxiety.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants