2 35 Neural and affective responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s own adolescent child and unfamiliar others signals using a high-pass filter (cutoff = 128 s) and included nuisance covariates to remove effects of run. To examine neural responses of parents to direct and averted gaze, identity of the person they made eye contact with (i.e., own child, unfamiliar child, unfamiliar adult and the self), and their interaction, we constructed a generalized linear model with eight regressors indicating cue onset for each condition separately and one regressor for onsets of subjective ratings. Cue onset regressors were defined from the onset of the video stimulus and modeled for the duration of the video (variable between 16-38 s). The subjective rating regressor was defined from the onset of each question and modeled for the duration the question was displayed on the screen, including 1000 ms during which a “Too late!” screen was shown in case participants did not answer within the set time period of 8000 ms (self-paced; mean duration = 3311 ms; SD = 1316 ms; range = 1029-9002 ms). We included 6 motion parameters (based on the realignment parameters) to correct for head motion. First, eight first-level SPM T-contrasts were specified for each condition (i.e., own child – direct gaze, own child – averted gaze, unfamiliar child – direct gaze, unfamiliar child – averted gaze, unfamiliar adult – direct gaze, unfamiliar adult – averted gaze, self – direct gaze, self – averted gaze). Second, these T-contrast images were entered in a 2 × 4 full factorial ANOVA design with two within-subject factors: Gaze direction (2 levels: Direct versus averted gaze) and target (4 levels: Own child, unfamiliar child, unfamiliar adult, self). Whole-brain SPM F-maps were computed to assess main effects of target and gaze direction, and their interaction, followed up by post-hoc analyses between all conditions. All whole-brain results were corrected for multiple comparisons with Family-Wise Error (FWE) cluster correction at p <.05 (with a cluster-forming threshold of p <.001). We performed control analyses to check for a potential impact of gender, handedness, current psychopathology and psychotropic medication status of parents, and current MDD/dysthymia diagnosis of the child on neural responses associated with making eye contact with different targets (Supplement S2.1). RESULTS Affective responses To assess the impact of eye contact (direct versus averted gaze) and how this may vary as a function of the targets in the videos, we performed a generalized linear mixed regression model with gaze direction (2 levels: Direct versus averted gaze) and target (4 levels: Own child, unfamiliar child, unfamiliar adult, self) on parents’ affect ratings after the videos. Our analyses revealed that prolonged direct gaze generally resulted in stronger feelings of connectedness (B = 0.39, SE = 0.12, t(854) = 3.29, p = .001, d = 0.65), more positive feelings about the targets
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