2 41 Neural and affective responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s own adolescent child and unfamiliar others Figure 2.4 A whole-brain analysis testing for a main effect of target (i.e., own child, unfamiliar child, unfamiliar adult, and self) on BOLD-responses revealed a set of brain regions sensitive to target identity. Parents (n = 79) showed decreased deactivation in right fusiform gyrus, left middle occipital gyrus, and right IFG to the sight of their own child versus others (A), and to the sight of others (i.e., own child, unfamiliar child, unfamiliar adult) versus self in left IFG, right dmPFC, left TPJ, and left precentral gyrus (B). Error bars represent standard error of the mean. Post-hoc results were Bonferroni corrected and tested in R using generalized linear mixed regression models. Significant p-values <.05 were indicated by *, p <.01 by **, and p <.001 by ***. Exploratory analyses To further explore hypotheses related to prolonged eye contact inducing feelings of connectedness we ran non-preregistered analyses where we explored parametric increases or decreases over the duration of the trial in neural activation specific to eye contact (Δdirect – averted gaze) with another person. For these analyses we focused on conditions where one could make eye contact with another person, collapsing across all ‘other’ conditions (i.e., own child, unfamiliar child, and unfamiliar adult). We split each trial into three epochs of equal length and subsequently tested for parametric increases and decreases with presentation duration [-1 0 1]. A parametric analysis testing for lineair increases in BOLD-response with increased eye contact revealed a significant cluster in right dmPFC (MNI (2, 38, 47), Z = 4.15, pcluster-level = .004, Figure
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