Lodder Gerine M A, Scholte Ron H J, Clemens Ivar A H, Engels Rutger C M E, Goossens Luc, Verhagen Maaike
Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2015 Apr 27;10(4):e0125141. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0125141. eCollection 2015.
The goal of the present study was to examine whether lonely individuals differ from nonlonely individuals in their overt visual attention to social cues. Previous studies showed that loneliness was related to biased post-attentive processing of social cues (e.g., negative interpretation bias), but research on whether lonely and nonlonely individuals also show differences in an earlier information processing stage (gazing behavior) is very limited. A sample of 25 lonely and 25 nonlonely students took part in an eye-tracking study consisting of four tasks. We measured gazing (duration, number of fixations and first fixation) at the eyes, nose and mouth region of faces expressing emotions (Task 1), at emotion quadrants (anger, fear, happiness and neutral expression) (Task 2), at quadrants with positive and negative social and nonsocial images (Task 3), and at the facial area of actors in video clips with positive and negative content (Task 4). In general, participants tended to gaze most often and longest at areas that conveyed most social information, such as the eye region of the face (T1), and social images (T3). Participants gazed most often and longest at happy faces (T2) in still images, and more often and longer at the facial area in negative than in positive video clips (T4). No differences occurred between lonely and nonlonely participants in their gazing times and frequencies, nor at first fixations at social cues in the four different tasks. Based on this study, we found no evidence that overt visual attention to social cues differs between lonely and nonlonely individuals. This implies that biases in social information processing of lonely individuals may be limited to other phases of social information processing. Alternatively, biased overt attention to social cues may only occur under specific conditions, for specific stimuli or for specific lonely individuals.
本研究的目的是检验孤独个体与非孤独个体在对社交线索的显性视觉注意方面是否存在差异。先前的研究表明，孤独与社交线索的注意后加工偏差（例如，消极解释偏差）有关，但关于孤独个体和非孤独个体在更早的信息加工阶段（注视行为）是否也存在差异的研究非常有限。25名孤独学生和25名非孤独学生参与了一项眼动追踪研究，该研究包括四项任务。我们测量了对表达情绪的面部眼睛、鼻子和嘴巴区域（任务1）、情绪象限（愤怒、恐惧、快乐和中性表情）（任务2）、带有积极和消极社会及非社会图像的象限（任务3）以及具有积极和消极内容的视频片段中演员面部区域（任务4）的注视（持续时间、注视次数和首次注视）。总体而言，参与者往往最常且最长时间地注视传达最多社交信息的区域，例如面部的眼睛区域（任务1）以及社会图像（任务3）。在静态图像中，参与者最常且最长时间地注视快乐的面孔（任务2），在消极视频片段中比在积极视频片段中更常且更长时间地注视面部区域（任务4）。孤独和非孤独参与者在注视时间和频率上以及在四项不同任务中对社交线索的首次注视上均未出现差异。基于这项研究，我们没有发现证据表明孤独个体与非孤独个体在对社交线索的显性视觉注意方面存在差异。这意味着孤独个体在社交信息加工方面存在的偏差可能仅限于社交信息加工的其他阶段。或者，对社交线索的显性注意偏差可能仅在特定条件下、针对特定刺激或特定孤独个体才会出现。
