title: Intergroup threat gates social attention in humans.
abstract: Humans shift their attention to follow another person's gaze direction, a phenomenon called gaze cueing. This study examined whether a particular social factor, intergroup threat, modulates gaze cueing. As expected, stronger responses of a particular in-group to a threatening out-group were observed when the in-group, conditioned to perceive threat from one of two out-groups, was presented with facial stimuli from the threatening and non-threatening out-groups. These results suggest that intergroup threat plays an important role in shaping social attention. Furthermore, larger gaze-cueing effects were found for threatening out-group faces than for in-group faces only at the 200 ms but not the 800 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA); the specificity of the gaze-cueing effects at the short SOA suggests that threat cues modulate the involuntary component of gaze cueing.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Yujie
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, People's Republic of China Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Chongqing, People's Republic of China zhaobee@swu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yufang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D002681:China; D003463:Cues; D005133:Eye Movements; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception
keywords: attention; gaze cueing; intergroup threat; self-defence; social attention