Authors: Toshiki Saito, Kosuke Motoki, Rui Nouchi, Ryuta Kawashima, Motoaki Sugiura（齊藤俊樹・元木康介・野内類・川島隆太・杉浦元亮）

Title: Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study

Journal(書誌情報）: Frontiers in Psychology

doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02967

論文URL: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02967/full

Abstract: Social connections are essential for human survival. Loneliness is a motivational factor for building and maintaining social connections. Automatic attention occurs with little cognitive effort and plays a key role in detecting biologically salient events, such as human faces. Although previous studies have investigated the effect of loneliness on social behavior, the effect of loneliness on automatic attention to human faces remains largely unknown. The present study investigated the effects of loneliness on automatic visual attention to warmth and competence facial information, which determines facial attraction. This study included 43 participants who rated warmth and competence facial information. Then, they engaged with the target-distractor paradigm in which they saw two house images at the top and bottom and indicated whether the images were identical. During the task, we presented two faces as distractors and measured visual attention toward the faces as automatic attention because participants did not have to attend to the faces. The results showed an interactive effect between subjective loneliness and facial information on automatic attention. Warm targets automatically captured the attention of people feeling relatively lonely, whereas competent targets automatically captured the attention of those who felt less lonely. These results suggest that loneliness adaptively influences automatic processing of social information.

著者Contact先の email: toshiki.saito [at] med.tohoku.ac.jp ([at] を@に置き換えてください）（齊藤俊樹）

日本語によるコメント（オプション，200-300字で）
街を歩いていると、沢山の人に目がとまる。この他者に対する自動的な注意は、孤独感の影響を受けることが明らかになった。視線計測器を用いた実験では、孤独な時は優しそうな人に目がとまる一方、孤独でない時は有能そうな人に目がとまった。目にとまる人を変化させることで適応的な社会関係の構築を促すという孤独感の役割が、本研究により示唆された。

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