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Social exclusion is a painful experience that is felt as a threat to the human need to belong and can lead to increased aggressive and anti-social behaviours, and results in emotional and cognitive numbness. Excluded individuals also seem to show an automatic tuning to positivity: they tend to increase their selective attention towards social acceptance signals. Despite these effects known in the literature, the consequences of social exclusion on social information processing still need to be explored in depth. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of social exclusion on processing two features that are strictly bound in the appraisal of the meaning of facial expressions: gaze direction and emotional expression. In two experiments (N = 60, N = 45), participants were asked to identify gaze direction or emotional expressions from facial stimuli, in which both these features were manipulated. They performed these tasks in a four-block crossed design after being socially included or excluded using the Cyberball game. Participants' empathy and self-reported emotions were recorded using the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and PANAS questionnaires. The Need Threat Scale and three additional questions were also used as manipulation checks in the second experiment. In both experiments, excluded participants showed to be less accurate than included participants in gaze direction discrimination. Modulatory effects of direct gaze (Experiment 1) and sad expression (Experiment 2) on the effects of social exclusion were found on response times (RTs) in the emotion recognition task. Specific differences in the reaction to social exclusion between males and females were also found in Experiment 2: excluded male participants tended to be less accurate and faster than included male participants, while excluded females showed a more accurate and slower performance than included female participants. No influence of social exclusion on PANAS or EQ scores was found. Results are discussed in the context of the importance of identifying gaze direction in appraisal theories.

In three experiments, we tested whether the amount of attentional resources needed to process a face displaying neutral/angry/fearful facial expressions with direct or averted gaze depends on task instructions, and face presentation. To this end, we used a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation paradigm in which participants in Experiment 1 were first explicitly asked to discriminate whether the expression of a target face (T1) with direct or averted gaze was angry or neutral, and then to judge the orientation of a landscape (T2). Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1 except that participants had to discriminate the gender of the face of T1 and fearful faces were also presented randomly inter-mixed within each block of trials. Experiment 3 differed from Experiment 2 only because angry and fearful faces were never presented within the same block. The findings indicated that the presence of the attentional blink (AB) for face stimuli depends on specific combinations of gaze direction and emotional facial expressions and crucially revealed that the contextual factors (e.g., explicit instruction to process the facial expression and the presence of other emotional faces) can modify and even reverse the AB, suggesting a flexible and more contextualized deployment of attentional resources in face processing.

The present study investigated if the gaze-cuing effect (i.e., the tendency for observers to respond faster to targets in locations that were cued by others' gaze direction than to not-cued targets) is modulated by the type of relationship (i.e., cooperative or competitive) established during a previous interaction with a cuing face. In two experiments, participants played a series of single-shot games of a modified version of the two-choice Prisoner's Dilemma against eight simulated contenders. They were shown a fictive feedback indicating if the opponents chose to cooperate or compete with them. Opponents' faces were then used as stimuli in a standard gaze-cuing task. In Experiment 1 females classified as average in competitiveness were tested, while in Experiment 2 females classified as high and low in competitiveness were tested. We found that only in females classified as low and average in competitiveness the gaze-cuing effect for competitive contenders was greater than for cooperative contenders. These findings suggest that competitive opponents represent a relevant source of information within the social environment and female observers with low and average levels of competition cannot prevent from keeping their eyes over them., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Gaze-following behaviour is considered crucial for social interactions which are influenced by social similarity. We investigated whether the degree of similarity, as indicated by the perceived age of another person, can modulate gaze following. Participants of three different age-groups (18-25; 35-45; over 65) performed an eye movement (a saccade) towards an instructed target while ignoring the gaze-shift of distracters of different age-ranges (6-10; 18-25; 35-45; over 70). The results show that gaze following was modulated by the distracter face age only for young adults. Particularly, the over 70 year-old distracters exerted the least interference effect. The distracters of a similar age-range as the young adults (18-25; 35-45) had the most effect, indicating a blurred own-age bias (OAB) only for the young age group. These findings suggest that face age can modulate gaze following, but this modulation could be due to factors other than just OAB (e.g., familiarity).

Gaze direction and facial expressions are critical components of face processing and have been shown to influence attention deployment. We investigated whether gaze direction (direct vs. averted) combined with a neutral or angry expression modulates the deployment of attentional resources over time. In a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm participants had to decide the gender of a neutral or an angry target face with direct or averted gaze (T1) and then to judge the orientation of a target picture of a landscape (T2), following the face at different time intervals. Results showed no attentional blink effect (i.e., no deterioration in T2 accuracy) when T1 was an angry face with direct gaze, whereas it was present for angry faces with averted gaze or neutral faces with either averted or direct gaze. These findings are consistent with appraisal theories and are discussed against the background of automatic processing of threat stimuli.

Previous studies have found that attention is oriented in the direction of other people's gaze suggesting that gaze perception is related to the mechanisms of joint attention. However, the role of the perception of gaze direction on joint attention has been challenged. We investigated the effects of disrupting gaze perception on the orienting of observers' attention, in particular, whether orienting to gaze direction is affected by the disruptive effect of negative contrast polarity on gaze perception. A dynamic distracting gaze was presented to observers performing an endogenous saccadic task. Gaze perception was manipulated by reversing the contrast polarity between the sclera and the iris. With positive display polarity, eye movement recordings showed shorter saccadic latencies when the direction of the instructed saccade matched the direction of the distracting gaze, and a substantial number of erroneous saccades towards the direction of the perceived gaze when the latter did not match the instruction. Crucially, such effects were not found when gaze contrast polarity was reversed and gaze perception was impaired. These results extend previous studies by demonstrating the existence of a direct link between joint attention and the perception of gaze direction, and show how orienting of attention to other people's gaze can be suppressed.

Previous work has found a left visual field (LVF) advantage for various judgements on faces, including identity and emotional expression. This has been related to possible right-hemisphere specialisation for face processing, and it has been proposed that this might reflect configural processing. We sought to determine whether a similar LVF advantage may also exist for gaze perception. In two experiments, normal adult subjects made judgements for seen gaze direction (left, right or straight). To assess how visual field may influence perception of gaze direction, eye stimuli were briefly presented unilaterally or bilaterally. In the latter case, the gaze direction of the two seen eyes could be congruent or incongruent (i.e. the two eyes could gaze in the same or different directions). For unilateral displays, performance was more accurate for LVF stimuli than RVF. With bilateral incongruent gaze, the LVF eye influenced judgements more strongly than the RVF eye. No such LVF advantage was found in a control experiment, in which subjects judged pupil size for similar eye stimuli. Taken together, these results reveal a LVF advantage for perception of gaze direction. Since only the eye region was visible, our results cannot be due to a LVF bias in processing the entire face context. Instead they suggest lateralisation specifically in processing the direction of seen gaze.

Boxing athletes code the opponents' intention to act in advance to plan and perform the most appropriate counterattack responses; in contrast, non-athletes respond with a defence action (Ottoboni, Russo, Tessari, 2015). We investigated whether such difference is limited at elaborating the most appropriate motor response or relies on different visual and attentional strategies during the early visual analysis of the opponent. We recorded saccades as indexes of visual attentional orienting during an implicit paradigm (i.e., a Simon-like task): nine experienced boxers and nine controls observed photographs of boxing attacks (jab and cross) or a neutral position (guard) and judged the colour of body parts either salient or not for elaborating the attack action (gloves vs. shorts, respectively) by shifting their gaze towards one of two lateral response boxes. Release reaction times (i.e., time between the start of the first saccade away from the fixation rectangle toward the response box) were faster toward the arm that seemed about to attack for the jab stance (the most dynamic one as implying motion) when judging the glove colour in both athletes and controls. No effect emerged when focusing on the shorts that provide irrelevant information for elaborating a defence or attack action. Therefore, athletes and controls seem to use the same visual strategies (saccadic movements) when analysing the opponent's posture before acting. However, if expertise brings better motor response processing as previously found, the difference between athletes and non-athletes must lay in a later cognitive stage (other than the visual one) devoted to plane the most effective motor response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies using spatial cueing paradigms have demonstrated that observing gaze direction may trigger a reflexive visual orienting in the direction of the other person’s gaze. Recently, it has been reported that facial expression may enhance the reflexive orienting of attention to gaze stimuli. However, some researchers have also suggested that, rather than facilitating attentional orienting away from the face, emotional expressions may, in fact, delay or prevent orienting. In the present study we investigated the effects of facial expression and gaze direction on a visual orienting oculomotor task to test whether an angry face may or may not interfere with visual orienting. Participants performed an oculomotor task in which they had to make a saccade towards one of two lateral targets, depending upon the colour of the fixation dot which appeared at the centre of the computer screen. The instruction dot remained visible for 50 ms and then disappeared. At different time intervals (stimulus onset asynchronies, SOAs: 50, 100, 150 ms) following the onset of the instruction cue, a real face (gazing either to the right or to the left) was presented at the centre of the monitor. Gaze direction could be congruent or incongruent with respect to the instruction and target location. Facial expression was also manipulated. In half of the trials the diverted gaze (i.e., congruent or incongruent) appeared with an angry expression, whereas in the other half the face had a neutral expression. Participants were instructed to saccade either to the target on the left or to the target on the right (the targets were visible throughout the trial), as indicated by the instruction dot, while completely disregarding the face because it was irrelevant for the task. Eye movement recordings on correct trials showed that saccades congruent with the direction of the distracting gaze had shorter latencies than incongruent ones. However, the time-course of this effect varied depending on the facial expression. With a neutral expression, the congruency effect was found only at the shortest SOA (50 ms). On the contrary, for the angry face the congruency effect occurred at the longer SOAs. These findings suggest that gaze direction (even when task-irrelevant) is capable of interfering with the orienting of visual attention, and that faces with an angry expression may hold attention and affect its orienting longer than a neutral expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]