2 49 Neural and affective responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s own adolescent child and unfamiliar others SUPPLEMENT S2.2 To assess the impact of eye contact on parents’ feelings (of connectedness) about the targets and their mood, we compared parents’ self-report ratings to the static pictures of the targets prior to the scan session with their ratings after the direct gaze trials in the first and second block of the task. We ran three separate GLMs for connectedness, parents’ feelings about the targets and mood of parents with target (4 levels: Own child, unfamiliar child, unfamiliar adult, self) and time point (3 levels: Pre-task, run 1, run 2) as predictors of parents’ self-report ratings. The analyses revealed a main effect of target for all response questions, showing that both in response to the static picture and after the videos of prolonged direct gaze parents reported to feel most connected and positive about the own child, and reported the highest mood after videos of their child versus an unfamiliar child and an unfamiliar adult (p <.001 for all). In addition, we found an interaction effect between target and time point for all response questions (connectedness: χ2(4) = 95.85, p <.001, parents’ feelings about targets: χ2(4) = 33.21, p <.001), parents’ own mood: χ2(6) = 14.59, p = .024). Interestingly, parents reported higher levels of connectedness and positive feelings towards an unfamiliar child and an unfamiliar adult after direct gaze videos in the scanner versus static pictures prior to the scan (p <.001 for both), while prolonged eye contact of parents with their own child did not affect how connected with or positive parents felt about their own child (Panel A and B). These latter findings are probably due to ceiling effects since parents reported very high levels of connectedness and positive feelings about their own child already before the task. Prolonged eye contact with others did not significantly affect parents’ mood and their mood even significantly decreased after prolonged direct gaze videos of themselves when compared to their ratings prior to the scan and after the first block (p = .030; Panel C). Self-reported affective responses of parents about their feelings of connectedness (A), how they feel about the targets (B), and their mood after seeing a static picture of each target (C) prior to the task (pre-task) and after the first (run 1) and second (run 2) run of direct gaze video stimuli in the scanner. Error bars represent standard error of the mean. Significant p-values <.05 were indicated by *, p <.01 by **, and p <.001 by ***.
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