60 Chapter 3 condition), we decided to focus on the contrast between self and an unfamiliar other adult in the main text. Nevertheless, we additionally analyzed all task conditions in a 2 × 4 ANOVA model (as preregistered), including participants’ responses when gazing into the eyes of one’s own child or an unfamiliar child and self-reported CEM, of which the results are presented in Supplement S3.2. Eye contact task To characterize mood and neural responses to prolonged eye contact, participants performed the “eye contact” task (Wever et al. (2022), see Figure 3.1 for an overview of the task). Participants were shown pre-recorded videos of four targets: Themselves; an unfamiliar adult; their own child; and an unfamiliar child. Each video consisted of a single target looking straight into the camera (direct gaze) or averting their gaze to the left (averted gaze). We measured participants’ eye movements during the task using an eye-tracker. All videos were presented twice in two separate runs (2 × 4 × 2 = 16 trials in total). For the first run, all targets were presented in a random order. For each target, participants were presented with two successive videos of the same target, but with gaze direction randomly presented (i.e., starting with direct or averted gaze). For the second run, the order of targets was randomized again, but the order of the presentation of the gaze direction was counterbalanced to the first run. Video durations were based on randomly chosen intervals between 16-38 s from prerecorded videos of 45 s (based on Somerville et al., 2013. The first and last 3 s of each prerecorded video were discarded. Stimuli from each condition were presented for a total duration of 54 s across two runs, meaning that duration of a stimulus in a specific condition in run 2 was 54 s minus stimulus duration in run 1 with a minimum of 16s. For this paper, we examined participants’ responses to direct versus averted gaze videos of themselves and a same-sex unfamiliar adult (e.g., unfamiliar other), which includes 8 trials in total. While in the scanner, participants were instructed to make eye contact with the targets in the videos. Each trial started with a fixation cross (duration: 2-5 s), after which participants were presented with a video of themselves or an unfamiliar other looking directly into the camera or averting their gaze. After each video, participants reported on their mood (“How do you feel at this moment?”) on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (very negative) to 7 (very positive) and were instructed to answer and confirm the question within 8s . In case participants did not answer within the set time period of 8 s, the question duration included an extra 1 s during which a “Too late!” screen was shown. See Supplement S3.3 for information on stimulus development.
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