title: The neural basis of intergroup threat effect on social attention.
abstract: Previous gaze-cuing studies found that intergroup threat is one of the modulators of gaze cuing. These findings indicate that intergroup threat would gate social attention by activating a network resembling that is thought to be involved in drawing or/and holding attention. The present study tested this hypothesis using a gaze-cuing task in which a particular in-group participants observed threatening out-group and nonthreatening out-group gazes, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. As expected, greater gaze cuing effect only emerged for threatening out-group when the in-group participants only felt inergroup threat from that out-group. Behaviorally, we found intergroup threatening out-group gazes did not draw attention faster than nonthreatening in-group gazes does. However, participants took more time to suppress the influence of the gaze direction of threatening out-group gazes, compared to nonthreatening in-group gazes, in the incongruent condition, which means intergroup threatening gaze holds attention longer than nonthreatening gaze does. Imaging results demonstrated that threatening cues recruited a fronto-parietal network, previously implicated in holding attention and execution functions. Our results, therefore, suggest that the mechanisms underpinning gaze cuing evolved to be sensitive to intergroup threatening stimuli, possibly because it is hard to disengage from such intergroup threatening cues once they are detected.
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.
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.
authors.forename: Yufang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Anhui, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Hongwen
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Lili
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Guan
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.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D044466:Asian People; D001288:Attention; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D012919:Social Behavior; D055815:Young Adult