Gaze Following in Newborns

Eye gaze has been shown to be an effective cue for directing attention in adults. Whether this ability operates from birth is unknown. Three experiments were carried out with 2‐ to 5‐day‐old newborns. The first experiment replicated the previous finding that newborns are able to discriminate between direct and averted gaze, and extended this finding from real to schematic faces. In Experiments 2 and 3 newborns were faster to make saccades to peripheral targets cued by the direction of eye movement of a central schematic face, but only when the motion of the pupils was visible. These results suggest that newborns may show a rudimentary form of gaze following.     

The central Europe experiment: Looking at persons and looking at objects

Gaze at objects, another person, and background was measured for fifteen dyads which constituted five different experimental groups in which task and situational factors were varied. The findings were that background stimuli had an unreliable effect on gaze; a very simple object relevant to the subject's task attracted a great deal of gaze and greatly reduced gaze at the other person. This effect was even stronger with a complex relevant object, where visual attention was almost completely transferred from the other person to the object. There was evidence of forces to avoid too much gaze at the other person. These findings suggested the possibility of postulating some new function of gaze in addition to information-seeking, or the possibility of an explanation in terms of the approach-avoidance model of gaze (Argyle & Dean, 1965).The authors are grateful to the S.S.R.C. for financial support.     

Follow My Gaze: Face Race and Sex Influence Gaze‐Cued Attention in Infancy

Using the eye gaze of others to direct one's own attention develops during the first year of life and is thought to be an important skill for learning and social communication. However, it is currently unclear whether infants differentially attend to and encode objects cued by the eye gaze of individuals within familiar groups (e.g., own race, more familiar sex) relative to unfamiliar groups (e.g., other race, less familiar sex). During gaze cueing, but prior to the presentation of objects, 10‐month‐olds looked longer to the eyes of own‐race faces relative to 5‐month‐olds and relative to the eyes of other‐race faces. After gaze cueing, two objects were presented alongside the face and at both ages, infants looked longer to the uncued objects for faces from the more familiar‐sex and longer to cued objects for the less familiar‐sex faces. Finally, during the test phase, both 5‐ and 10‐month‐old infants looked longer to uncued objects relative to cued objects but only when the objects were cued by an own‐race and familiar‐sex individual. Results demonstrate that infants use face eye gaze differently when the cue comes from someone within a highly experienced group.     

Greater Pupil Size in Response to Emotional Faces as an Early Marker of Social‐Communicative Difficulties in Infants at High Risk for Autism

When scanning faces, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have shown reduced visual attention (e.g., less time on eyes) and atypical autonomic responses (e.g., heightened arousal). To understand how these differences might explain subclinical variability in social functioning, 9‐month‐olds, with or without a family history of ASD, viewed emotionally expressive faces, and gaze and pupil diameter (a measure of autonomic activation) were recorded using eye‐tracking. Infants at high risk for ASD with no subsequent clinical diagnosis (HRA‐) and low‐risk controls (LRC) showed similar face scanning and attention to eyes and mouth; attention was overall greater to eyes than mouth, but this varied as a function of the emotion presented. As a group, HRA‐ showed significantly larger pupil size than LRC. Correlations between scanning at 9 months, pupil size at 9 months, and 18‐month social‐communicative behavior, revealed positive associations between pupil size and attention to both face and eyes at 9 months in LRC, and a negative association between 9‐month pupil size and 18‐month social‐communicative behavior in HRA‐.The present findings point to heightened autonomic arousal in HRA‐. Further, with greater arousal relating to worse social‐communicative functioning at 18 months, this work points to a mechanism by which unaffected siblings might develop atypical social behavior.     

The Relative Salience of Physiognomic Cues in Differentiating Faces: A Methodological Tool

This research utilized a novel methodology to explore the relative salience of facial cues to age, sex, race, and emotion in differentiating faces. Inspired by the Stroop interference effect, participants viewed pairs of schematic faces on a computer that differed simultaneously along two facial dimensions (e.g., race and age) and were prompted to make similarity judgments about the faces along one of the dimensions (e.g., race). On a second round of trials, judgments were made along the other dimension (e.g., age). Analysis of response speed and accuracy revealed that participants judged the race of the faces more quickly and with fewer errors compared to their age, gender, or emotional expression. Methodological and theoretical implications for studying the role of facial cues in social perception are discussed.     

Disentangling the Effects of an Adult Model's Eye Gaze and Head Orientation on Young Infants' Processing of a Previously Attended Object

In order to disentangle the effects of an adult model's eye gaze and head orientation on infants' processing of objects attended to by the adult, we presented 4‐month‐olds with faces that either (1) shifted eye gaze toward or away from an object while the head stayed stationary or (2) that turned their head while maintaining gaze directed straight ahead. Infants' responses to the previously attended and unattended objects were measured using eye‐tracking and event‐related potentials. In both conditions, infants responded to objects that were not cued by the adult's head or eye gaze shift with more visual attention and an increased negative central (Nc) component relative to cued objects. This suggests that cued objects had been encoded more effectively, whereas uncued objects required further processing. We conclude that eye gaze and head orientation act independently as cues to direct infants' attention and object processing. Both head orientation and eye gaze, when presented in motion, even override the effects of incongruent stationary information from the other kind of cue.     

“I Know That You Know How I Feel”: Behavioral and Physiological Signals Demonstrate Emotional Attunement While Interacting with a Computer Simulating Emotional Intelligence

Human–human communication studies have suggested that within communicative interactions, individuals acknowledge each other as intentional agents and adjust their emotion nonverbal behavior according to the other. This process has been defined as emotional attunement. In this study, we examine the emotional attunement process in the context of affective human–computer interactions. To this purpose, participants were exposed to one of two conditions. In one case, they played with a computer that simulated understanding of their emotional reactions while guiding them across four different game-like activities; in the other, the computer guided participants across the activities without mentioning any ability to understand emotional responses. Face movements, gaze direction, posture, vocal behavior, electrocardiogram and electrodermal activity were simultaneously recorded during the experimental sessions. Results showed that if participants were aware of interacting with an agent able to recognize their emotions, they reported that the computer was able to “understand” them and showed a higher number of nonverbal behaviors during the most interactive activity. The implications are discussed.     

Using Object Knowledge in Visual Tracking and Reaching

Nine‐month‐old infants were presented with an engaging and challenging task of visually tracking and reaching for a rolling ball that disappeared and reappeared from behind an occluder. On some trials, the infant observed the experimenter place a barrier on the ball's track; the barrier remained partially visible above the occluder throughout the remainder of the trial. When the task involved only predictive tracking, infants' anticipatory gaze shifts were faster when no barrier was present. When the task involved both tracking and reaching, there were more reaches when no barrier was present. If the infant reached, the timing and extension of the reach and the accompanying gaze shift did not differ with regard to the barrier. Because catching the ball was quite difficult for these infants, task demands interfered with the integration of visual information and visuospatial reasoning about the barrier with the reaching action.     

The Stability of Facial Attractiveness: Is It What You’ve Got or What You Do with It?

Physical attractiveness is suggested to be an indicator of biological quality and therefore should be stable. However, transient factors such as gaze direction and facial expression affect facial attractiveness, suggesting it is not. We compared the relative importance of variation between faces with variation within faces due to facial expressions. 128 participants viewed photographs of 14 men and 16 women displaying the six basic facial expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and a neutral expression. Each rater saw each model only once with a randomly chosen expression. The effect of expressions on attractiveness was similar in male and female faces, although several expressions were not significantly different from each other. Identity was 2.2 times as important as emotion in attractiveness for both male and female pictures, suggesting that attractiveness is stable. Since the hard tissues of the face are unchangeable, people may still be able to perceive facial structure whatever expression the face is displaying, and still make attractiveness judgements based on structural cues.     

Judging Facial Emotion Expressions in Context: The Influence of Culture and Self-Construal Orientation

We assessed the impact of social context on the judgment of emotional facial expressions as a function of self-construal and decoding rules. German and Greek participants rated spontaneous emotional faces shown either alone or surrounded by other faces with congruent or incongruent facial expressions. Greek participants were higher in interdependence than German participants. In line with cultural decoding rules, Greek participants rated anger expressions less intensely and sad and disgust expressions more intensely. Social context affected the ratings by both groups in different ways. In the more interdependent culture (Greece) participants perceived anger least intensely when the group showed neutral expressions, whereas sadness expressions were rated as most intense in the absence of social context. In the independent culture (Germany) a group context (others expressing anger or happiness) additionally amplified the perception of angry and happy expressions. In line with the notion that these effects are mediated by more holistic processing linked to higher interdependence, this difference disappeared when we controlled for interdependence on the individual level. The findings confirm the usefulness of considering both country level and individual level factors when studying cultural differences.     

Addressing religious plurality – a teacher perspective on minority religion and secular ethics education

The Finnish education system recognizes religious plurality by offering education in pupils’ own religion or in secular ethics. However, little research has been undertaken on how plurality is addressed in classroom practice. This study investigates how 31 minority religion and secular ethics teachers view the task of supporting and including plurality within their classrooms. The findings of this study show how instruction places high demands on teachers due to religious and cultural diversity, as well as age differences in the classroom. Teachers generally made an effort to take diversity into account by considering the different backgrounds of pupils in instruction and engaging pupils in class. However, teachers frequently took a traditional rather than a modern perspective on plurality in religious instruction by assuming pupils’ religious belonging. Confessional elements such as religious family background and religious practice outside school were also commonly seen as vital. Consequently, teachers had at times difficulties in supporting pupils with plural or little religious affiliation. The findings show a need to strengthen the non-confessional character of Finnish religious education so that both modern and traditional plurality among pupils occupy an equal position in the classroom.     

Looking Behavior and Smiling in Down Syndrome Infants

We studied the relation between direction of gaze and smiling in 15 typically developing infants and 15 infants with Down syndrome. All of them were videotaped during face-to-face interaction with their mothers at home, and while having access to their familiar toys. Results showed that mothers in the two groups behaved in a similar way; that Down syndrome infants looked at their mother's face for longer than typically developing children; and that the relationship between looking and smiling was similar in the two cases and reflected as an increase in the time the infant looked at its mother's face and a decrease in the time the infant looked at toys. It was deduced that Down syndrome infants are capable of distinguishing the differential significance of faces and toys, so that, in the same way as typically developing infants, they direct their affective behavior fundamentally towards the social element, which leads us to consider the affiliative function implied by this expression.     

Individuelle und kontextuelle Determinanten der Teilhabe an Sozialkapital

We ask for conditions influencing membership in social organizations as strongholds of social capital. Beside individual characteristics, contextual factors such as political, social, or economic settings are also taken into consideration to explain individual decisions to participate in social organizations. The influences of individual and contextual level factors are tested simultaneously in several multi-level analyses. The results show that membership in social associations on the one hand is affected by individual characteristics such as marked trust in others, high level of education, church attendance, strong ties with the neighbourhood, age and sex, and on the other hand by contextual factors such as a catholic social context and institutional settings. In particular, Swiss direct democracy offering larger possibilities of participation facilitates membership in social organizations.     

Multiple Measures of Fixation on Social Content in Infancy: Evidence for a Single Social Cognitive Construct?

The preference of infants to fixate on social information in a stimulus is well known. We examine how this preference manifests across a series of free‐viewing tasks using different stimulus types. Participants were thirty typically developing infants. We measured eye movements when viewing isolated faces, faces alongside objects in a grid, and faces naturally presented in photographed scenes. In each task, infants fixated social content for longer than nonsocial content. Social preference scores representing distribution of fixation to social versus general image content were highly correlated and thus combined into a single composite measure, which was independent of demographic and behavioral measures. We infer that multiple eye‐tracking tasks can be used to generate a composite measure of social preference in infancy. This approach may prove useful in the early characterization of developmental disabilities.     

Older Adults’ Trait Impressions of Faces Are Sensitive to Subtle Resemblance to Emotions

Younger adults (YA) attribute emotion-related traits to people whose neutral facial structure resembles an emotion (emotion overgeneralization). The fact that older adults (OA) show deficits in accurately labeling basic emotions suggests that they may be relatively insensitive to variations in the emotion resemblance of neutral expression faces that underlie emotion overgeneralization effects. On the other hand, the fact that OA, like YA, show a ‘pop-out’ effect for anger, more quickly locating an angry than a happy face in a neutral array, suggests that both age groups may be equally sensitive to emotion resemblance. We used computer modeling to assess the degree to which neutral faces objectively resembled emotions and assessed whether that resemblance predicted trait impressions. We found that both OA and YA showed anger and surprise overgeneralization in ratings of danger and naiveté, respectively, with no significant differences in the strength of the effects for the two age groups. These findings suggest that well-documented OA deficits on emotion recognition tasks may be more due to processing demands than to an insensitivity to the social affordances of emotion expressions.     

POWER IN A RURAL COUNTY

To more fully understand power structures in rural settings, this article investigates the power structure of an economically depressed rural county in southwestern Pennsylvania. The power structure must be viewed in the context of the economic hard times that the county has confronted. In this regard, there has been a decline in the number of local economic notables over the years making the formation of growth machines unlikely. The most powerful individual in the county, a wealthy philanthropist, has enhanced his stature and influence in the community by forming an economic development organization in an attempt to improve the economic situation in the county. The other powerful individuals in the county are political or state actors, who have benefited from the increases in government funding for various social programs.     

Power Eliminates the Influence of Body Posture on Facial Emotion Recognition

We investigated how power priming affects facial emotion recognition in the context of body postures conveying the same or different emotion. Facial emotions are usually recognized better when the face is presented with a congruent body posture, and recognized worse when the body posture is incongruent. In our study, we primed participants to either low, high, or neutral power prior to their performance in a facial-emotion categorization task in which faces were presented together with a congruent or incongruent body posture. Facial emotion recognition in high-power participants was not affected by body posture. In contrast, low-power and neutral-power participants were significantly affected by the congruence of facial and body emotions. Specifically, these participants displayed better facial emotion recognition when the body posture was congruent, and worse performance when the body posture was incongruent. In a following task, we trained the same participants to categorize two sets of novel checkerboard stimuli and then engaged them in a recognition test involving compounds of these stimuli. High, low, and neutral-power participants all showed a strong congruence effect for compound checkerboard stimuli. We discuss our results with reference to the literature on power and social perception.     

The Use of Adventure Therapy Techniques by Clinical Social Workers: Implications for Practice and Training

Adventure therapy, an experiential intervention that combines outdoor, adventure based activities and group process, is used in direct practice by clinical social workers; however, it is unclear to what extent clinical social workers are actually utilizing these techniques. This research project surveyed a random sample of clinical social workers and examined in greater depth how they are utilizing adventure therapy programming with different clients in various treatment settings, as well as what type of education and training they received for engaging in these practices. A random sample of 646 clinical social workers in NASW responded to the survey, and more than 1/3 of this sample (35.1 %) reported the use of adventure based activities for therapeutic purposes in their social work practice. However, few of the social workers reported formal education or training in the use of adventure therapy, highlighting the need for more attention in both educational and clinical settings to proper instruction around this growing intervention.     

Effects of gaze on hiring,credibility, attraction and relational message interpretation

Two competing models of the social meaning and effects of eye gaze exist. One holds that different levels of eye gaze have clearly identifiable meanings that will yield main effects on such communication outcomes as hiring and interpersonal evaluations. The other holds that deviant levels of eye gaze are ambiguous in meaning and that interpretation depends on contextual cues such as the reward value of the violator. An experiment required 140 Ss to serve as interviewers during a structured interview in which six confederate interviewees sytematically varied three levels of eye gaze (high, normal, low) and two levels of reward (highly qualified, highly unqualified for the advertised position). Results favored a social meaning model over a violations of expectations model: Subjects were more likely to hire and rate as credible and attractive interviewees who maintained a normal or high degree of gaze than those who averted gaze. Interpretations given to higher amounts of gaze were more intimacy and similarity, more immediacy and involvement, and more composure, informality and nonarousal.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

—Guillaume de Salluste

—T.S. Eliot

     

Stress and social work lecturers: Dreaming spires,ivory towers or besieged in concrete blocks?

The focus of this article is upon the impact of environmental stress and demands on social work lecturers. Stress is experienced as an individual phenomenon by social work lecturers, but is considered within a structural and an institutional context. In particular, it is examined against the background of recent developments in higher education generally, such as the Higher Education Funding Council quality assessment visits and the research assessment exercise. In recent years, there have been significant alterations to the shape of social work education with the establishment of the DipSW, its modification and review, and the development of Post Qualifying Consortia. Classic features of stress have been imposed on social work lecturers particularly by their institutions and other organisations, leading to a lack of control, an imbalance of demands over resources, role overload and role conflict. These stressors impact negatively upon interpersonal relationships with colleagues and students. Some suggestions are made for improving the structural and especially the organisational coping resources available to social work lecturers in order to assist them to develop more effective responses to stress.