2 31 Neural and affective responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s own adolescent child and unfamiliar others looking into the eyes of their child/parent. They were also instructed not to stare, but to gaze as natural as possible and blinking was allowed. The target persons of the unfamiliar child and unfamiliar adult conditions of both genders were approached in the context of stimuli development for the current task and were selected based on age (between 45-55 years for the unfamiliar adults and between 11-17 years for the unfamiliar child) and gender. Videos were recorded under similar circumstances as videos of parents and children who participated in the study and written informed consent was taken to confirm the approval of the targets to use their videos in the present study. All videos were presented twice in two separate runs (2 × 8 = 16 trials in total). For the first run, all targets were presented in a random order. For each target, parents were presented with two successive videos of the same target, but with gaze direction randomized (i.e., either starting with direct gaze or averted gaze, followed by the other direction). For the second run, the order of targets was randomized again, but the order of the presentation of the gaze direction was counterbalanced to the first run. The durations of the videos were based on a randomly chosen interval between 16-38 s from prerecorded videos of 45 s. The first and last 3 s of each prerecorded video were discarded due to reduced recording quality. Stimuli from each condition were presented for a total duration of 54 s across two repeats, meaning that duration of a stimulus in a specific condition in run 2 was 54 s minus stimulus duration in run 1 with a minimum of 16 s (range: 16-38 s). Stimulus presentation and simultaneous eye movement recordings were conducted using E-Prime 2.0 software (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA, United States) and the screen resolution was 1024 × 768 pixels. The videos were presented on the screen in 960 × 540 pixels. The task took about ± 11 min in total. Eye tracking Eye movements during the eye contact task were recorded with a tower mounted monocular EyeLink 1000 MRI-compatible remote eye tracker with 1000 Hz sampling rate (SR Research Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada). The eye tracker was placed inside the scanner bore and detected the pupil and corneal reflection of the right eye via a mirror attached to the head coil. The eye tracker was calibrated and validated using a nine-point calibration grid from EyeLink’s own calibration protocol (see below for details).
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