2 45 Neural and affective responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s own adolescent child and unfamiliar others involved (i.e., motivation of the gazer, mentalizing, theory-of-mind), which may not differ between the sight of an unfamiliar child and adult. An innovative aspect of the present study was the assessment of parents’ gaze during the task in the scanner to assess how much eye contact they actually made with the targets in the videos. Corroborating findings from experimental studies (outside the scanner), we found that parents gazed more towards the eye region of the targets during direct versus averted gaze videos (Hessels, 2020; Hietanen, 2018; Kleinke, 1986). This indicates that direct gaze attracts and maintains people’s attention more than averted gaze. Regarding the distinct targets in the videos, parents made more eye contact with an unfamiliar adult versus their own child or an unfamiliar child, while no differences were found in the amount of gaze towards the (whole) face of the targets. A possible explanation for this effect might be that eye contact among adults may also serve functions other than affiliation. For example, eye contact is used for defining a hierarchy (Tang & Schmeichel, 2015). Such processes may be less relevant when adults make eye contact with a child. Another interesting finding was that despite the instructions of making eye contact with the persons in the videos, participants only made eye contact for 30-40% of the time, which may illustrate a deeply ingrained notion of how much eye gazing is appropriate during social interactions. To date, very little is known about the underlying mechanism of this very basic and automated dynamic process of making and breaking eye contact during social interactions. Future studies should focus on the mechanism of this process, which likely plays an important role in the communicative function of eye contact. The main reason for including the self condition in which parents were presented with videos of their own prolonged direct and averted gaze was to disentangle whether the neural responses that we found were uniquely social in nature (i.e., in interaction with other people) rather than lower-level perceptual responses of seeing a face. Our results demonstrated that videos containing a social “other” (versus the self) reliably engaged regions in the theory of mind and empathy networks (Bzdok et al., 2012), including TPJ, dmPFC, and IFG. Interestingly, videos with a direct (versus averted) gaze of themselves increased parents own mood in a similar way as the videos of others. Moreover, parents did not show substantial differences in eye gaze behavior towards their own eye regions versus the eye region of the others, indicating that they were equally able to make eye contact with themselves during the videos as they did with the other targets. Taken together, the self-condition enabled us to uncover unique effects of eye contact with other people on positive affect and the involvement of a unique set of brain regions associated with making eye contact with others. Interestingly, the results regarding the selfcondition illustrate that gazing into one’s own eyes can also have a mood-boosting effect, which is an interesting avenue for future research and clinical interventions.
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