7 197 Summary and general discussion task instruction to make eye contact with the targets throughout the videos. We were able to conduct the eye contact task in adolescents with a clinically diagnosed depressive disorder, which yields new knowledge on how this may affect one’s responses to eye contact with others and potentially undermine the parent-child bond. Lastly, almost all study measures, hypotheses, and analyses were preregistered prior to data analysis, which contributes to the credibility of the results and to the transparency of science in general. Although our studies yield novel results that contribute to the field, several limitations need to be kept in mind when interpreting the findings. First, we tried to present the participants with video clips of social settings closely mimicking daily life situations, while at the same time being able to control the targets’ gaze direction and facial expressions (eye contact task), and autobiographical stories (empathic accuracy task). However, the ecological validity of these social situations remains a matter of debate. It is well possible that the pre-recorded target videos of eye contact used in this study did not elicit a comparable level of physiological arousal in the participants as might have happened during eye contact encounters and interactions in real life. In addition, participants did not receive any reciprocal feedback from the targets during the sight of the pre-recorded videos in the eye contact task and empathic accuracy task and did not have the opportunity to adjust their responses accordingly as they probably would have during face-to-face eye contact in real life. Using real interaction partners to assess eye contact, however, would have introduced several other, even more serious, methodological challenges. We could not have controlled targets’ gaze direction, which is an important factor in our design, and people might have made behavioral responses interfering with the experiment, e.g., bursting into laughter when gazing into each other’s eyes. As such, this would have limited experimental control within the paradigms and potentially introduced considerable experimental noise. Nevertheless, future studies including the assessment of eye contact during real life or virtual reality interactions are necessary to examine whether these study set-ups give rise to different outcomes and would inform us on which kind of stimuli are needed in future studies on eye contact. In the context of the replicability crisis in the field of psychology and neuroscience, especially for task-based functional MRI research (Collaboration;, 2015; Poldrack et al., 2017), it is of note that our findings from the novel functional MRI paradigms need to be interpreted with caution. Future studies should aim for replicating the findings to prevent false positive results. It is worth to say, however, that the neuroimaging results of the eye contact task conducted in the parents and adolescents showed considerable overlap (Figure 7.2), supporting the robustness of the findings using this task. Another challenge that is closely linked the reproducibility crisis is the use of small sample sizes. Although the larger part of our studies includes accountable sample sizes (n ≥ 60), the study on depressed adolescents (Chapter 6) might be underpowered (n = 19 depressed adolescents). As such, replication with larger sample sizes is recommended to
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