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Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study

Social connections are essential for human survival. Loneliness is a motivational factor for building and maintaining social connections. Automatic attention occurs with little cognitive effort and plays a key role in detecting biologically salient events, such as human faces. Although previous stud...

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Autores principales: Saito, Toshiki, Motoki, Kosuke, Nouchi, Rui, Kawashima, Ryuta, Sugiura, Motoaki
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6979038/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32010024
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02967
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author Saito, Toshiki
Motoki, Kosuke
Nouchi, Rui
Kawashima, Ryuta
Sugiura, Motoaki
author_facet Saito, Toshiki
Motoki, Kosuke
Nouchi, Rui
Kawashima, Ryuta
Sugiura, Motoaki
author_sort Saito, Toshiki
collection PubMed
description Social connections are essential for human survival. Loneliness is a motivational factor for building and maintaining social connections. Automatic attention occurs with little cognitive effort and plays a key role in detecting biologically salient events, such as human faces. Although previous studies have investigated the effect of loneliness on social behavior, the effect of loneliness on automatic attention to human faces remains largely unknown. The present study investigated the effects of loneliness on automatic visual attention to warmth and competence facial information, which determines facial attraction. This study included 43 participants who rated warmth and competence facial information. Then, they engaged with the target-distractor paradigm in which they saw two house images at the top and bottom and indicated whether the images were identical. During the task, we presented two faces as distractors and measured visual attention toward the faces as automatic attention because participants did not have to attend to the faces. The results showed an interactive effect between subjective loneliness and facial information on automatic attention. Warm targets automatically captured the attention of people feeling relatively lonely, whereas competent targets automatically captured the attention of those who felt less lonely. These results suggest that loneliness adaptively influences automatic processing of social information.
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spelling pubmed-69790382020-02-01 Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study Saito, Toshiki Motoki, Kosuke Nouchi, Rui Kawashima, Ryuta Sugiura, Motoaki Front Psychol Psychology Social connections are essential for human survival. Loneliness is a motivational factor for building and maintaining social connections. Automatic attention occurs with little cognitive effort and plays a key role in detecting biologically salient events, such as human faces. Although previous studies have investigated the effect of loneliness on social behavior, the effect of loneliness on automatic attention to human faces remains largely unknown. The present study investigated the effects of loneliness on automatic visual attention to warmth and competence facial information, which determines facial attraction. This study included 43 participants who rated warmth and competence facial information. Then, they engaged with the target-distractor paradigm in which they saw two house images at the top and bottom and indicated whether the images were identical. During the task, we presented two faces as distractors and measured visual attention toward the faces as automatic attention because participants did not have to attend to the faces. The results showed an interactive effect between subjective loneliness and facial information on automatic attention. Warm targets automatically captured the attention of people feeling relatively lonely, whereas competent targets automatically captured the attention of those who felt less lonely. These results suggest that loneliness adaptively influences automatic processing of social information. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-01-17 /pmc/articles/PMC6979038/ /pubmed/32010024 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02967 Text en Copyright © 2020 Saito, Motoki, Nouchi, Kawashima and Sugiura. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Saito, Toshiki
Motoki, Kosuke
Nouchi, Rui
Kawashima, Ryuta
Sugiura, Motoaki
Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study
title Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study
title_full Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study
title_fullStr Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study
title_full_unstemmed Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study
title_short Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study
title_sort loneliness modulates automatic attention to warm and competent faces: preliminary evidence from an eye-tracking study
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6979038/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32010024
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02967
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