Bias For Faces Research Articles

Reduced left visual field bias for faces in adolescents with social anxiety disorder

ABSTRACT Introduction: Individuals tend to explore the left side of a face first and for a longer time in comparison to the right side. This left visual field (LVF) bias is suggested to reflect right hemispheric dominance for face processing. Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with maladaptive interpretations of facial expressions, but it is not known whether this is linked to an atypical LVF bias. Previous studies have reported a reduced LVF bias in autism, a condition overlapping with SAD. This pre-registered study examined the LVF bias in adolescents with SAD. Methods: Eye-tracking was used to investigate the ratio of first fixations to the left on upright and inverted face stimuli in 26 adolescents (13-17 years) with SAD and 23 healthy controls primed to look either between the eyes or at the mouth. Results: The SAD group showed a smaller LVF bias and an atypical face inversion effect when primed to look at the eyes. Autistic traits predicted a smaller LVF bias, independently of social anxiety level. Conclusions: Results suggest that SAD is associated with impaired processing of faces at an early stage of visual scanning. The findings contribute to a better understanding of SAD and its overlap with autism.

General and own-species attentional face biases.

Humans demonstrate enhanced processing of human faces compared with animal faces, known as own-species bias. This bias is important for identifying people who may cause harm, as well as for recognizing friends and kin. However, growing evidence also indicates a more general face bias. Faces have high evolutionary importance beyond conspecific interactions, as they aid in detecting predators and prey. Few studies have explored the interaction of these biases together. In three experiments, we explored processing of human and animal faces, compared with each other and to nonface objects, which allowed us to examine both own-species and broader face biases. We used a dot-probe paradigm to examine human adults' covert attentional biases for task-irrelevant human faces, animal faces, and objects. We replicated the own-species attentional bias for human faces relative to animal faces. We also found an attentional bias for animal faces relative to objects, consistent with the proposal that faces broadly receive privileged processing. Our findings suggest that humans may be attracted to a broad class of faces. Further, we found that while participants rapidly attended to human faces across all cue display durations, they attended to animal faces only when they had sufficient time to process them. Our findings reveal that the dot-probe paradigm is sensitive for capturing both own-species and more general face biases, and that each has a different attentional signature, possibly reflecting their unique but overlapping evolutionary importance.

Trajectories of anxiety when children start school: The role of behavioral inhibition and attention bias to angry and happy faces.

Extensive research has examined attention bias to threat in the context of anxiety in adults, but little is understood about this association in young children, and there is a dearth of longitudinal research examining whether attention bias to threat predicts anxiety over time in childhood. In the current study, a sample of 180 children participated in a longitudinal study, first as preschoolers and again as they transitioned to formal schooling. At baseline, children aged 3-4 years completed a free-viewing eye-tracking task with angry-neutral and happy-neutral face pairs and an assessment of behavioral inhibition (BI). At follow-up, parents provided daily reports of their child's state anxiety over a 2-week period as their child started school and completed a measure of their child's anxiety symptoms. Results indicated that, on average, preschool-aged children exhibit a bias for emotional faces that is stronger for angry than happy faces. There was little evidence that this bias was associated with anxiety symptoms. However, BI interacted with dwell bias for angry faces to predict trajectories of anxiety over the transition to school. An unexpected interaction between BI and dwell bias for happy faces was also found, with dwell for happy faces associated with lower anxiety for children higher in BI. The findings are consistent with recent developmental models of the BI-anxiety relationship and indicate that attention bias modification may not be suitable for young children, for whom attention bias to threat may be normative. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Cultural Differences in the Time Course of Configural and Featural Processing for Own-race Faces

Previous research suggests that East Asians pay more attention than Caucasian Westerners to configural information in faces, while the latter group pays more attention to featural information. However, it is unclear whether this cultural variation in attention produces a different time course of the processing bias for configural and featural information. This was examined using event-related potentials in a spatial attention paradigm. Chinese and Westerners were instructed to attend to the locations of two face images or houses. Although the race-related difference was absent in behavioral performance and N170 component, Chinese participants exhibited a configural processing bias on P1 component in the case of both own- and other-race faces and a featural processing bias on P2 component for own-race faces. In contrast, Westerners exhibited a featural processing bias for own-race faces and a configural processing bias for other-race faces on P1 component, whereas a configural processing bias was observed on P2 component for both own- and other-race faces. These results demonstrate that there are important differences between East Asians and Westerners in their relative preferences for configural versus featural processing of own-race faces, but not other-race faces. The relative roles of configural and featural information processing for faces are thus dependent on both who is looking (the culture or race of the observer) and what they are looking at (the race of the face): Easterners enjoy an early global/configural processing bias and a late local/featural processing bias for own-race faces, while Westerners benefit from an early local/featural processing bias and a late global/configural processing bias for own-race faces; both of the groups have an early and late global/configural processing bias for other-race faces.

Differential sensitivity to species- and race-based information in the development of attention orienting and attention holding face biases in infancy.

Experience-based biases in face processing can reflect both attention orienting biases that support efficient selection of faces from competing stimuli and attention holding biases that allow for detailed encoding of selected faces. It is well established that infants demonstrate both species- and race-based biases in attention holding. Fewer studies have found species-based, but not race-based, orienting biases in infancy but these studies examined species- and race-based biases separately and measured overall orienting without examining attention to distractors. The present study directly compared 6- and 11-month-old infants' species- and race-based biases in attention holding and orienting to faces. We measured infants' duration of looking and frequency/speed of orienting to own-race, other-race, and monkey faces in multi-item search arrays, and their frequency of orienting to faces and distractors during search. Infants showed expected species- and race-based biases in attention holding but only a species-based bias in overall orienting. However, they also showed reduced orienting to salient distractors in the context of own-race faces. These results suggest that orienting mechanisms mediating face selection are robustly driven by species information while orienting to faces versus distractors during search may also reflect prior learning about frequently experienced own-race faces.

Ambitious Women: Gender and Voter Perceptions of Candidate Ambition

Are ambitious women punished in politics? Building on literature from negotiation, we argue that women candidates who are perceived to be ambitious are more likely to face social backlash. We first explore what the term ‘ambitious’ means to voters, developing and testing a new multidimensional concept of perceived ambition, from desire to run for higher office to scope of agenda. We then test the link between these ‘ambitious’ traits and voter support for candidates using five conjoint experiments in two countries, the U.S. and the U.K. Our results show that while ambitious women are not penalized overall, the aggregate results hide differences in taste for ambitious women across parties. We find that in the U.S. left-wing voters are more likely to support women with progressive ambition than right-wing voters (difference of 7% points), while in the U.K. parties are not as divided. Our results suggest that ambitious women candidates in the U.S. face bias particularly in the context of non-partisan races (like primaries and local elections), when voters cannot rely on party labels to make decisions.

The role of TPH2 variant rs4570625 in shaping infant attention to social signals

TPH2, the rate-limiting enzyme in the synthesis of serotonin, has been connected to several psychiatric outcomes. Its allelic variant, rs4570625, has been found to relate to individual differences in cognitive and emotion regulation during infancy with T-carriers of rs4570625 showing a relatively heightened attention bias for fearful faces. A significant gene-environment interaction was also reported with the T-carriers of mothers with depressive symptoms showing the highest fear bias.We investigated these associations in a sample of 8-month old infants (N = 330), whose mothers were prescreened for low/high levels of prenatal depressive and/or anxiety symptoms. Attention disengagement from emotional faces (neutral, happy, fearful, and phase-scrambled control faces) to distractors was assessed with eye tracking and an overlap paradigm. Maternal depressive symptoms were assessed at several time points during pregnancy and postpartum. The mean levels of symptoms at six months postpartum and the trajectories of symptoms from early pregnancy until six months postpartum were used in the analyses (N = 274).No main effect of the rs4570625 genotype on attention disengagement was found. The difference in fear bias between the genotypes was significant but in an opposite direction compared to a previous study. The results regarding the interaction of the genotype and maternal depression were not in accordance with the previous studies.These results show inconsistencies in the effects of the rs4570625 genotype on attention biases in separate samples of infants from the same population with only slight differences in age.

Can we reduce facial biases? Persistent effects of facial trustworthiness on sentencing decisions

Trait impressions from faces influence many consequential decisions even in situations in which decisions should not be based on a person's appearance. Here, we test (a) whether people rely on trait impressions when making legal sentencing decisions and (b) whether two types of interventions—educating decision-makers and changing the accessibility of facial information—reduce the influence of facial stereotypes. We first introduced a novel legal decision-making paradigm. Results of a pretest (n = 320) showed that defendants with an untrustworthy (vs. trustworthy) facial appearance were found guilty more often. We then tested the effectiveness of different interventions in reducing the influence of facial stereotypes. Educating participants about the biasing effects of facial stereotypes reduced explicit beliefs that personality is reflected in facial features, but did not reduce the influence of facial stereotypes on verdicts (Study 1, n = 979). In Study 2 (n = 975), we presented information sequentially to disrupt the intuitive accessibility of trait impressions. Participants indicated an initial verdict based on case-relevant information and a final verdict based on all information (including facial photographs). The majority of initial sentences were not revised and therefore unbiased. However, most revised sentences were in line with facial stereotypes (e.g., a guilty verdict for an untrustworthy-looking defendant). On average, this actually increased facial bias in verdicts. Together, our findings highlight the persistent influence of trait impressions from faces on legal sentencing decisions.

When a Specialty Becomes "Women's Work": Trends in and Implications of Specialty Gender Segregation in Medicine.

The gender composition of physician specialties varies dramatically with some becoming increasingly female predominant while others remain overwhelmingly male. In their analysis of physician workforce data, the authors demonstrate that despite large increases in the number of female physicians over 4 decades, the degree of gender segregation between specialties has not declined. The authors describe lessons from the highly gender-segregated U.S. workforce as a whole to understand these demographic patterns in the physician workforce. Echoing U.S. workforce findings, women physicians are becoming overrepresented in certain specialties, and this appears to be associated with a relative decline in earnings for physicians in these specialties over time. The authors found a strong negative relationship between the proportion of female physicians in a specialty and its mean salary, with gender composition explaining 64% of the variation in salaries among the medical specialties.Female physicians face biases in the workplace and fall behind male peers in leadership attainment, academic advancement, and earnings. Tenacious gender stereotypes and the conflation of gender and status contribute to these biases and reinforce occupational gender segregation. The clustering of women in certain specialties means these specialties will be disproportionately affected by gender bias. Recognizing the consequences of gender demographics within physician specialties is important to maintain the strong and diverse physician workforce needed to support the health care needs of the populations who depend on these specialties for care.

What drives the attentional bias for fearful faces? An eye-tracking investigation of 7-month-old infants' visual scanning patterns.

Seven-month-old infants display a robust attentional bias for fearful faces; however, the mechanisms driving this bias remain unclear. The objective of the current study was to replicate the attentional bias for fearful faces and to investigate how infants' online scanning patterns relate to this preference. Infants' visual scanning patterns toward fearful and happy faces were captured using eye tracking in a paired-preference task, specifically exploring if the fear preference is driven by increased attention to particular facial features. Infants allocated increased attention toward the fearful face compared to the happy face overall, thus successfully replicating the attentional bias, and greater attention toward the fearful eyes was associated with a greater magnitude of the fear preference. The current findings suggest that the fearful eyes are a salient facial feature in capturing infants' attention toward the fearful face and that increased scanning of the fearful eyes may be one mechanism driving the overall fear preference. In addition, scanning patterns, and attention to critical features specifically, are highlighted as a strategy for examining the mechanisms underlying the development of emotion recognition abilities in infancy.

Mechanisms of cross-modal selective attentional bias for negative faces of anger and disgust in high-trait anxiety individuals.

Research reveals that selective attentional bias to socially negative information is a reliable characteristic of individuals with high-trait anxiety (HTA). However, for selective attentional bias across sensory channels (visual and auditory), the interaction between attentional bias type and negative face type remains unclear. In this study, we recruited 30 individuals with high- and low-trait anxiety (LTA) (15 in each group), and measured their engagement and disengagement bias indices using the cross-modal attentional-probe paradigm, and measured the occipital P1 component using a 64-channel electroencephalography system. The results showed that under the engagement condition in the HTA group, the occipital P1 amplitude of an angry face was smaller than that of a neutral face, and there also exhibited smaller attentional bias indices of angry faces in the HTA group than that of the LTA group. For the presence of disgusted faces, the attentional bias indices of the HTA group were smaller than that of the LTA group under the disengagement condition. These findings demonstrate that the selective attentional bias occurs both in the engagement and the disengagement facets within the cross modal. There is a feature of facilitated attentional engagement bias for an angry face, and a feature of promoted attentional disengagement bias for a disgusted face in HTA individuals.

Attentional biases in pediatric chronic pain: an eye-tracking study assessing the nature of the bias and its relation to attentional control.

Attentional biases are posited to play a key role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain in adults and youth. However, research to date has yielded mixed findings, and few studies have examined attentional biases in pediatric samples. This study used eye-gaze tracking to examine attentional biases to pain-related stimuli in a clinical sample of youth with chronic pain and pain-free controls. The moderating role of attentional control was also examined. Youth with chronic pain (n = 102) and pain-free controls (n = 53) viewed images of children depicting varying levels of pain expressiveness paired with neutral faces while their eye gaze was recorded. Attentional control was assessed using both a questionnaire and a behavioural task. Both groups were more likely to first fixate on high pain faces but showed no such orienting bias for moderate or low pain faces. Youth with chronic pain fixated longer on all pain faces than neutral faces, whereas youth in the control group exhibited a total fixation bias only for high and moderate pain faces. Attentional control did not moderate attentional biases between or within groups. The results lend support to theoretical models positing the presence of attentional biases in youth with chronic pain. Further research is required to clarify the nature of attentional biases and their relationship to clinical outcomes.

Tying the knot with a robot: legal and philosophical foundations for human–artificial intelligence matrimony

Technological progress may eventually produce sophisticated robots with human-like traits that result in humans forming meaningful relationships with them. Such relationships would likely lead to a demand for human–artificial intelligence (AI) matrimony. U.S. Supreme Court decisions that expanded the definition of marriage to include interracial and same-sex couples, as well as those that have not extended marriage to polygamous relationships, provide guidance regarding the criteria that human–AI would have to meet to successfully assert a right to marry. Ultimately, robots will have to possess certain characteristics of personhood to marry, including the capacity to contract and to engage in an intimate relationship. Alternatively, if AIs can simulate these abilities sufficiently, we may believe that they have these capacities. Even if AIs genuinely possess the capabilities necessary to enter into a marriage, it is social acceptance of intelligent non-humans as life partners that will likely influence legal development is this realm rather than personhood criteria. However, AIs are likely to face bias due to their “artificial” rather than biological nature. Yet, Peter Singer’s influential argument regarding speciesism in the context of animal rights implies that AIs with specific human-like qualities cannot be justifiably denied certain rights.

Neurocognitive processes in d-cycloserine augmented single-session exposure therapy for anxiety: A randomized placebo-controlled trial

Drugs targeting N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptors and the ability to learn new associations have been proposed as adjunct treatments to boost the success of exposure therapy for anxiety disorders. However, the effects of the NMDA partial agonist d-cycloserine on psychological treatment have been mixed. We investigated potential neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the clinical effects of d-cycloserine-augmented exposure, to inform the optimal combination of this and similar agents with psychological treatment. Panic disorder patients were randomised to single-dose d-cycloserine (250 mg; N = 17) or matching placebo (N = 16) 2hrs before one session of exposure therapy. Neurocognitive markers were assessed one day after treatment, including reaction-time based threat bias for fearful faces (primary outcome) and amygdala response to threat (secondary outcome). Clinical symptom severity was measured the day before and after treatment, and at 1- and 6-months follow-up (secondary outcome). d-cycloserine was associated with greater clinical recovery at 1-month follow-up than placebo (d-cyloserine 71% vs placebo 25%), with the placebo group matching the clinical gains of the d-cycloserine group during 6-months follow-up (d-cycloserine 71% vs placebo 44%). One day after treatment, threat bias for fearful faces and amygdala threat response was lower in the drug compared to placebo group. Lower amygdala magnitude predicted greater clinical improvement during follow-up across groups. While this experimental study is of a preliminary nature due to the limited sample size, these findings highlight a neurocognitive potential mechanism by which d-cycloserine may exert its augmentative effects on psychological treatment and bring forward a marker that may help understand and facilitate development of combination treatments for anxiety. (d-cycloserine Augmented CBT for Panic Disorder; clinicaltrials.gov; NCT01680107).

Assessing the presence of face biases by means of anorthoscopic perception

Anorthoscopy is a presentation mode in which an image is shown sliding behind a slit-shaped aperture, so that it is visible only part by part and never in its entirety. With the aims to assess (1) whether the processing of complex stimuli (faces) correctly occurs in anorthoscopy, and (2) whether the Own-Gender Bias (OGB: the better recognition of stimuli belonging to the same gender of the observer: faster and more accurate) and the Left-Face Bias (LFB: the preference to analyze the left half of the face) occur in such a part by part presentation, we presented female and male faces as whole stimuli (Experiment 1) and in anorthoscopy (Experiments 2 and 3), as well as female/male chimeric faces (Experiment 4), during a gender categorization task. Experiment 1 confirmed that participants correctly categorized the gender of faces, but the OGB was not found. In Experiments 2 and 3 we manipulated the direction (Experiment 2: upward/downward; Experiment 3: leftward/rightward), the speed (slow and fast) of the sliding faces, and the width of the aperture (small and large). Both tasks revealed that facial gender was correctly categorized in anorthoscopy. The OGB was found, but only for males/females in Experiments 2/3, respectively. In Experiment 4 the LFB emerged only in the tachistoscopic session, suggesting that this perceptual bias does not extend to anorthoscopy.

Three-month-old infants show enhanced behavioral and neural sensitivity to fearful faces

An important feature of the development of emotion recognition in infants is the emergence of a robust attentional bias for fearful faces. There is some debate about when this enhanced sensitivity to fearful expressions develops. The current study explored whether 3-month-olds demonstrate differential behavioral and neural responding to happy and fearful faces. Three-month-old infants (n = 69) participated in a behavioral task that assessed whether they show a visual preference for fearful faces and an event-related potential (ERP) task that assessed their neural responses to fearful and happy faces. Infants showed a looking preference for fearful over happy faces. They also showed differential neural responding over occiptotemporal regions that have been implicated in face perception (i.e., N290, P400), but not over frontocentral regions that have been implicated in attentional processes (i.e., Nc). These findings suggest that 3-month-olds display an early perceptual sensitivity to fearful faces, which may presage the emergence of the attentional bias for fearful faces in older infants. Tracking the ontogeny of this phenomenon is necessary to understand its relationship with later developmental outcomes.

Face perception without subjective awareness – Emotional expressions guide early gaze behavior in clinically depressed and healthy individuals

BackgroundMajor depressive disorder is associated with attentional biases in the explicit processing of emotional facial expressions. It is unclear if attentional biases for emotional faces also exist at an automatic level of perception. MethodGaze behavior of twenty-nine clinically depressed individuals and twenty-nine gender matched healthy controls was compared in an affective priming task. Happy, neutral, sad, angry, and fearful facial expressions were presented very briefly as primes with forward and backward masking, followed by a neutral expression. Participants’ early gaze behavior on neutral faces was analyzed for the eyes and mouth as areas of interest. Only participants who were subjectively unaware of the emotional prime faces were included in the analyses. ResultsMasked emotional facial expressions elicited early eye movements toward diagnostic features of the face. Both, depressed patients and healthy controls oriented their initial fixation on the face more often to the eye region after the presentation of fearful or sad compared to happy primes. However, depressed patients oriented their gaze generally far less to the eye and mouth region compared to healthy controls. LimitationAwareness of emotional prime faces was assessed by a systematic interview but not by an objective detection task. ConclusionOur data suggest enhanced attentional orienting toward the eye region due to fearful and sad faces in depressed and healthy individuals. In spite of this early expression-specific vigilance, depressed individuals oriented their gaze overall less to the eyes and mouth compared to healthy controls, which might represent an avoidance of facial features.

Gender Bias and Intergenerational Educational Mobility: Theory and Evidence from China and India

This paper incorporates gender bias against girls in the family, school and labor market in a model of intergenerational persistence in schooling where parents self-finance children's education because of credit market imperfections. Parents may underestimate a girl's ability, expect lower returns, and assign lower weights to their welfare (pure son preference). The model delivers the widely used linear conditional expectation function under constant returns and separability but generates an irrelevance result: parental bias does not affect relative mobility. With diminishing returns and complementarity, the conditional expectation function can be concave or convex, and parental bias affects both relative and absolute mobility. This paper tests these predictions in India and China using data not subject to coresidency bias. The evidence rejects the linear conditional expectation function in rural and urban India in favor of a concave relation. Girls in India face lower mobility irrespective of location when born to fathers with low schooling, but the gender gap closes when the father is college educated. In China, the conditional expectation function is convex for sons in urban areas, but linear in all other cases. The convexity supports the complementarity hypothesis of Becker et al. (2018) for the urban sons and leads to gender divergence in relative mobility for the children of highly educated fathers. In urban China, and urban and rural India, the mechanisms are underestimation of the ability of girls and unfavorable school environment. There is some evidence of pure son preference in rural India. The girls in rural China do not face bias in financial investment by parents, but they still face lower mobility when born to uneducated parents. Gender barriers in rural schools seem to be the primary mechanism.

Preferential attention to same‐and other‐ethnicity infant faces does not fully overcome the other‐race effect

AbstractGiven the attentional and motivational saliency of infant faces, triggered by a set of perceptual baby schema features, other‐ethnicity infant faces may overcome the processing differences associated with the other‐race effect (ORE). Using an attentional bias paradigm, we found that while there was a same‐ethnicity attentional bias for adult faces, there was no difference in attention to same‐ and other‐ethnicity infant faces, suggesting that other‐ethnicity infant faces are equally salient and not subject to the same bias as other‐ethnicity adult faces. To directly measure the ORE, we used a recognition memory test to measure differences between same‐ and other‐ethnicity infant and adult faces. Regardless of age, same‐ethnicity faces were better remembered than other‐ethnicity faces. Further, regardless of ethnicity, adult faces were better remembered than infant faces, a finding consistent with an Other Age Effect. Taken together, these experiments suggest that the saliency of baby schema does not fully overcome the social or perceptual factors leading to the ORE.

Cross-cultural analysis of attention disengagement times supports the dissociation of faces and patterns in the infant brain

Infants are slower to disengage from faces than non-face patterns when distracted by novel competing stimuli. While this perceptual predilection for faces is well documented, its universality and mechanisms in relation to other aspects of attention are poorly understood. We analysed attention disengagement times for faces and non-face patterns in a large sample of 6-to 9-month-old infants (N = 637), pooled from eye tracking studies in socioculturally diverse settings (Finland, Malawi, South Africa). Disengagement times were classified into distinct groups of quick and delayed/censored responses by unsupervised clustering. Delayed disengagement was frequent for faces (52.1% of trials), but almost negligible for patterns (3.9% of trials) in all populations. The magnitude of this attentional bias varied by individuals, whereas the impact of situational factors and facial expression was small. Individual variations in disengagement from faces were moderately stable within testing sessions and independent from variations in disengagement times for patterns. These results point to a fundamental dissociation of face and pattern processing in infants and demonstrate that the bias for faces can be robust against distractors and habituation. The results raise the possibility that attention to faces varies as an independent, early-emerging social trait in populations.