Overt and covert attention to emotional faces in realistic social situations

Sociality is an essential aspect of humanity. Coexisting with others requires shifting and sustaining attention to individuals’ critical social cues, including emotional expressions. Gaze serves as a tool to gather information from other people and the environment, and to communicate intent. Therefore, understanding gaze behavior and neural mechanisms underlying attention in social contexts is relevant for comprehensively understanding human interactions. However, a large proportion of attention research has been conducted in controlled laboratory settings, reducing the ecological validity of findings. To address this real-world gap in social attention research, we conducted three studies aiming to investigate both gaze behavior and neural mechanisms involved in the intersection of social and emotion-driven attention in both realistic situations and laboratory settings. The three projects varied in their level of naturalness of the context, to investigate whether findings from laboratory experiments could be translated to real-life situations, and vice-versa. Study 1 was conducted in a naturalistic setting (waiting room), half of the participants (n = 24) saw a live confederate in the room and the other half (24) viewed a prerecorded video of the same confederate. The confederate displayed positive, neutral and negative facial expressions and participants’ gaze behavior was tracked via a mobile eye-tracker. Results showed that participants looked more at the video of the confederate, than to the live confederate and that emotional expressions did not modulate gaze behavior in both contexts. Study 2 was conducted in a fully controlled laboratory setting, where EEG and eye-tracking were co-registered to assess participants’ gaze behavior and neural activity. Participants (n = 48) viewed static images of faces displaying neutral, happy and angry expressions. Across three blocks, participants were to either direct their gaze toward peripheral faces (overt attention), keep their gaze fixed at the center of the screen (covert attention), or look freely around the screen (uninstructed natural attention). We found that emotional expressions were processed in the brain earlier and longer during natural attention shifts, whereas gaze was not modulated by emotional content, but only by instruction type. Finally, Study 3 provided an intermediate level of naturalness, blending a laboratory setting with a social manipulation. We investigated gaze behavior and neural activity by co-registering EEG and eye-tracking. Participants (n = 74) performed a difficult discrimination task and received feedback in the form of 1-second videoclips of a confederate displaying positive, neutral, or negative expressions. Participants believed that the feedback was either automatically generated by a computer (non-social context) or selected by an experimenter in the adjacent room (social context). The results showed that social context did not influence gaze behavior or brain activity, though positive expressions elicited distinct neural responses in late brain components. Altogether, these findings demonstrate that stimulus relevance, cognitive resource availability and direct overt attention modulate attention to emotions in social and non-social contexts. Additionally, they showed how laboratory and naturalistic studies may complement each other to draw a comprehensive picture of attention mechanisms in everyday life. The current thesis creates a bridge between real-life an laboratory studies on social and emotion-driven attention.