title: The appeal of the devil's eye: social evaluation affects social attention.
abstract: Humans typically exhibit a tendency to follow the gaze of conspecifics, a social attention behaviour known as gaze cueing. Here, we addressed whether episodically learned social knowledge about the behaviours performed by the individual bearing the gaze can influence this phenomenon. In a learning phase, different faces were systematically associated with either positive or negative behaviours. The same faces were then used as stimuli in a gaze-cueing task. The results showed that faces associated with antisocial norm-violating behaviours triggered stronger gaze-cueing effects as compared to faces associated with sociable behaviours. Importantly, this was especially evident for participants who perceived the presented norm-violating behaviours as far more negative as compared to positive behaviours. These findings suggest that reflexive attentional responses can be affected by our appraisal of the valence of the behaviours of individuals around us.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padua, Italy.
authors.forename: Luciana
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Carraro
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padua, Italy. mario.dalmaso@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Mario
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0199-7861
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dalmaso
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padua, Italy.
authors.forename: Luigi
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Castelli
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padua, Italy.
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Galfano
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Filosofia, Sociologia, Pedagogia e Psicologia Applicata, University of Padova, Via Venezia 14, 35131, Padua, Italy.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bobbio
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padua, Italy.
authors.forename: Gabriele
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Mantovani
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D012919:Social Behavior; D012938:Social Perception; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Episodic learning; Gaze cueing; Social cognition; Visual attention