2 43 Neural and affective responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s own adolescent child and unfamiliar others Lastly, we checked whether severity of depressive symptoms of parents’ adolescent child have affected how parents respond to direct and averted gaze of the targets. These analyses demonstrated that all previously reported significant results remained significant after controlling for adolescents’ depressive symptoms (i.e., affective, gaze, and neural responses). DISCUSSION The goal of this study was to investigate neural and affective responses to eye contact with one’s own child and testing the uniqueness of these patterns when comparing them to eye contact with an unfamiliar child and adult. We developed a new fMRI paradigm using direct and averted gaze stimuli of prolonged duration, which allowed us to capture positive affect and feelings of connectedness elicited by eye contact. The results indicate that prolonged eye contact induces positive feelings and feelings of social connectedness. Interestingly, these increases were stronger when making eye contact with unfamiliar others versus one’s own child, probably due to the fact that feelings of connectedness with one’s own child were high at baseline. While we found no robust evidence for neural correlates of direct versus averted gaze when analyzing neural responses across the entire duration of the videos, an exploratory parametric analysis indicated that dmPFC activity linearly increased with the duration of eye contact. Moreover, this increased dmPFC activity correlated positively with self-reported connectedness, suggesting that activity in this region may be related to an increase in feelings of connectedness with others during prolonged eye contact. Finally, our results demonstrated increased neural response to seeing one’s own child versus other people in a network of brain regions previously associated with the processing of personally familiar faces (i.e., inferior occipital gyrus and fusiform gyrus) and preparing a communicative (parenting) response, such as the initiation of social interaction (i.e., IFG; Cavallo et al., 2015; Feldman, 2017; Pfeiffer et al., 2013; Taylor et al., 2009). After looking at prolonged direct versus averted gaze videos participants generally reported to feel more connected and more positive about the targets and reported to have a better mood. When comparing participants’ affective responses after the direct gaze videos of the targets to their responses at baseline, when rating the static pictures, prolonged eye contact resulted in stronger feelings of connectedness and more positive feelings about the others. These findings indicate that looking at prerecorded eye contact videos of prolonged durations can induce positive feelings about others and feelings of connectedness, confirming the validity of our new paradigm to induce positive affiliative reactions. This is in line with our hypotheses and with the literature emphasizing enhanced positive affective responses to eye contact (Hietanen, 2018). In terms of BOLD-responses, our results indicated no robust evidence of differences in neural processing between direct and averted gaze videos. However, most studies that found differential neural responses to direct versus averted gaze used stimuli with a short duration (< 2 s), and
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