Posts tagged social perception
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Whites of Their Eyes: Study Finds Infants Respond to Social Cues From Sclera
Humans are the only primates with large, highly visible sclera – the white part of the eye.
The eye plays a significant role in the expressiveness of a face, and how much sclera is shown can indicate the emotions or behavioral attitudes of a person. Wide-open eyes, exposing a lot of white, indicate fear or surprise. A thinner slit of exposed eye, such as when smiling, expresses happiness or joy. Averted eyes, as well as direct eye contact, can mean several things. So the eye white, or how much of it is shown and at what angle, plays a role in the social and cooperative interactions among humans.
Adult humans are well-attuned to social cues involving the eye and use them, along with a great range of other facial and body features, to respond appropriately during social interactions. This sensitivity to eye cues is hard-wired into the brain of adults as they respond to social eye cues even without consciously seeing them.
But it is unclear whether the ability to unconsciously distinguish between different social cues indicated by the eyes exists early in development and can therefore be considered a key feature of the human social makeup.
A new University of Virginia and Max Planck Institute study, published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that the ability to respond to eye cues apparently develops during infancy – at seven or so months.
“Our study provides developmental evidence for the notion that humans possess specific brain processes that allow them to automatically respond to eye cues,” said Tobias Grossmann, a University of Virginia developmental psychologist and one of the study’s authors.
Grossmann and his Max Planck Institute colleague Sarah Jessen used electroencephalography, or EEG, to measure the brain activity of 7-month-old infants while showing images of eyes wide open, narrowly opened, and with direct or averted gazes.
They found that the infants’ brains responded differently depending on the expression suggested by the eyes they viewed, which were shown absent of other facial features. They viewed the eye images for only 50 milliseconds – which is much less time than needed for an infant of this age to consciously perceive this kind of visual information.
“Their brains clearly responded to social cues conveyed through the eyes, indicating that even without conscious awareness, human infants are able to detect subtle social cues,” Grossmann said.
The infants’ brain responses displayed a different pattern to sclera depicting fearful expressions (wide-eyed) to non-fearful sclera. They also showed brain responses that differed when viewing direct gaze eyes compared to averted gaze.
“This demonstrates that, like adults, infants are sensitive to eye expressions of fear and direction of focus, and that these responses operate without conscious awareness,” Grossmann said. “The existence of such brain mechanisms in infants likely provides a vital foundation for the development of social interactive skills in humans.”
The infants in the study wore an EEG cap, like a small hat, which included sensors that could detect brain signals. Infants were sitting in the laps of their parents during the testing.
Faces Are More Likely to Seem Alive When We Want to Feel Connected
Feeling socially disconnected may lead us to lower our threshold for determining that another being is animate or alive, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“This increased sensitivity to animacy suggests that people are casting a wide net when looking for people they can possibly relate to — which may ultimately help them maximize opportunities to renew social connections,” explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Katherine Powers of Dartmouth College.
These findings enhance our understanding of the factors that contribute to face perception, mind perception, and social relationships, but they could also shed light on newer types of relationships that have emerged in the modern age, Powers argues, including our relationships with pets, online avatars, and even pieces of technology, such as computers, robots, and cell phones.
Feeling socially connected is a critical part of human life that impacts both mental and physical health; when we feel disconnected from others, we try to replenish our social connections.
“As social beings, we have an intrinsic motivation to pay attention to and connect with other people,” says Powers. “We wanted to examine the influence of this social motive on one of the most basic, low-level aspects of social perception: deciding whether or not a face is alive.”
Powers and colleagues had 30 college students view images of faces, which were actually morphs created by combining inanimate faces (such as a doll’s face) with human faces. The morphs ranged from 0% human to 100% human and showed both male and female faces.
The morphs were presented in random order and the students had to decide whether each face was animate or inanimate. Afterwards, they completed a survey that gauged their desire for social connections, in which they rated their agreement with statements such as “I want other people to accept me.”
The data revealed that desire for social connections was associated with a lower threshold for animacy. In other words, participants who had high scores on the social connections measure didn’t need to see as many human-like features in a face order to decide that it was alive.
To see if there might be a causal link, Powers and colleagues conducted another study in which they experimentally manipulated feelings of social connection.
A separate group of college students completed a personality questionnaire and were provided feedback ostensibly based on the questionnaire. In reality, the feedback was determined by random assignment. Some students were told that their future lives would be isolated and lonely, while others were told their lives would contain long-lasting, stable relationships. The feedback also included personality descriptions and statements tailored to each participant to ensure believability.
The students then viewed the face morphs.
As expected, students who had been told they would be isolated and lonely showed lower thresholds for animacy than those who were told they would have long-lasting relationships.
These findings are particularly interesting, the researchers argue, because previous research has shown that people are typically cautious in determining whether a face is alive:
“What’s really interesting here is the degree of variability in this perception,” says Powers. “Even though two people may be looking at the same face, the point at which they see life and decide that person is worthy of meaningful social interaction may not be the same — our findings show that it depends on an individual’s social relationship status and motivations for future social interactions.”
“I think the fact that we can observe such a bias in the perception of basic social cues really underscores the fundamental nature of the human need for social connection,” Powers adds.
Loneliness? It’s all a state of mind
Researchers from UCL have found that lonely people have less grey matter in a part of the brain associated with decoding eye gaze and other social cues.
Published in the journal of Current Biology, the study also suggests that through training people might be able to improve their social perception and become less lonely.
“What we’ve found is the neurobiological basis for loneliness,” said lead author Dr Ryota Kanai (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). “Before conducting the research we might have expected to find a link between lonely people and the part of the brain related to emotions and anxiety, but instead we found a link between loneliness and the amount of grey matter in the part of the brain involved in basic social perception.”
To see how differences in loneliness might be reflected in the structure of the brain regions associated with social processes, the team scanned the brains of 108 healthy adults and gave them a number of different tests. Loneliness was self-reported and measured using a UCLA loneliness scale questionnaire.
When looking at full brain scans they saw that lonely individuals have less greymatter in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS)—an area implicated in basic social perception, confirming that loneliness was associated with difficulty in processing social cues.
“The pSTS plays a really important role in social perception, as it’s the initial step of understanding other people,” said Dr Kanai. “Therefore the fact that lonely people have less grey matter in their pSTS is likely to be the reason why they have poorer perception skills.”
In order to gauge social perception, participants were presented with three different faces on a screen and asked to judge which face had misaligned eyes and whether they were looking either right or left. Lonely people found it much harder to identify which way the eyes were looking, confirming the link between loneliness, the size of the pSTS and the perception of eye gaze.
“From the study we can’t tell if loneliness is something hardwired or environmental,” said co-author Dr Bahador Bahrami (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). “But one possibility is that people who are poor at reading social cues may experience difficulty in developing social relationships, leading to social isolation and loneliness.”
One way to counter this loneliness could be through social perception training with a smartphone app.
“The idea of training is one way to address this issue, as by maybe using a smartphone app to improve people’s basic social perception such as eye gaze, hopefully we can help them to lead less lonely lives,” said Dr Kanai.
(Source: ucl.ac.uk)