46 Chapter 2 The newly developed eye contact task benefits from a personalized task design, allowing us to examine parents’ affective, gaze, and neural responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s own child and others, which generalizes across mothers and fathers. Nevertheless, this study is not without limitations. Although the prolonged duration of the video stimuli in the present study allowed us to capture affiliative responses elicited by eye contact, it probably limited the detection of processes that happened on a shorter time scale after stimulus onset, such as the recognition of gaze direction. As a next step, it would be of great interest to investigate how parents respond to video stimuli of their own child and others comparing various presentation durations. In addition, the video stimuli in the current task are closer to natural interactions compared to the static pictures that have been used before, but the use of pre-recorded video stimuli, in contrast to real life gaze encounters, might have elicited responses that are not identical to eye-to-eye contact during live interactions. Future studies should take a next step in studying eye contact during live interactions to assess how people respond to prolonged eye contact during real life interactions. This is emphasized by studies showing that prolonged eye contact elevated participants’ levels of arousal only in case of real life bidirectional eye contact (Hietanen et al., 2020; Jarick & Bencic, 2019). As we have not assessed whether the prolonged video stimuli of direct gaze increased parents’ levels of arousal in the task, this would be an interesting addition to the current paradigm. Notwithstanding these limitations, our findings show that the prolonged eye contact stimuli used in the present study successfully induced affiliative responses, including positive affect and social connectedness and increased dmPFC activation that covaried with presentation duration of direct gaze. Lastly, by performing a parametric analysis over the duration of the trials we assumed that the increase in dmPFC activation is linear, while in fact we do not know the exact shape of this response. Moreover, since we were agnostic about the mapping between neural responses and the BOLD-response associated with increased prolonged exposure, we used a canonical hemodynamic response function. Also, it is of note that the subdivision of trial duration in three epochs of equal length to assess changes in BOLDresponses over time is relatively arbitrary and a different subdivision might have possibly led to a different outcome. Although this finding is in line with prior research (Cavallo et al., 2015) and the expectation that higher-order social processes, such as mentalizing, starts to become increasingly involved as the duration of eye contact continues, it needs to be interpreted with caution and future studies should focus on replication of this effect. CONCLUSION We developed a personalized fMRI paradigm including dynamic stimuli, suited to measure affective, gaze, and neural responses to prolonged eye contact. Our results show that our task enhances parents’ positive feelings about the targets and their feelings of connectedness. The multimethod approach did not only inform us on how parents respond to eye contact at the
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