The dynamics of eye-to-eye contact in social anxiety and autism: A naturalistic dyadic eye-tracking paradigm

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Gregor Domes; Professor Dr. Markus Heinrichs
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 390532448

The eyes convey a multitude of social information, and direct eye contact is involved in the regulation of social interactions. The avoidance of direct eye contact is a common symptom in both social anxiety disorder (SAD) and Autism Spectrum disorder (ASD). However, there appear to be differences in the motivation to avoid eye gaze in SAD and ASD. In SAD, the avoidance of direct eye contact is thought to be mediated by fear, and thus is expected to increase with the perceived threat in social situations. In ASD, the decreased direct eye contact may be rooted in a failure to understand the socially-informative function of eye contact (and mutual gaze), leading to neglect of socially-relevant stimuli. To date, gaze behavior in SAD and ASD has not been compared directly. Furthermore, most prior studies have used highly standardized - but relatively non-naturalistic - static stimuli to investigate gaze behavior.The present project aims to investigate the role of eye contact in naturalistic social interaction. For this aim, we use a novel naturalistic dynamic dual-eye-tracking paradigm to simultaneously track participants* eye gaze in the context of semi-structured dyadic interactions. This procedure enables us to study the dynamics of eye-to-eye contact and draw conclusions about when and why eye contact is initiated, maintained, avoided and reciprocated during a natural conversation between two individuals.More specifically, we are interested in the differential patterns of eye contact made by individuals with ASD and SAD as compared to healthy controls in naturalistic interactions with varying levels of social evaluative threat. Individuals with ASD and SAD displayed marked avoidance of eye contact in previous studies that used observational designs or static pictures of facial expressions. However, there is accumulating evidence that individuals with SAD are highly sensitive to social threat and might therefore avoid eye contact to regulate their fear in social situations. Following this hypothesis, we expect both clinical groups to demonstrate impaired, yet similar eye contact with their conversation partner under the low evaluative threat condition, we anticipate that the SAD patients will display marked impairment in eye contact under the high evaluative threat condition compared to participants with ASD and the control group.The results of the study are expected to contribute significantly to our understanding of non-verbal factors such as gaze behavior in social interactions. In using a naturalistic eye-tracking paradigm, we expect novel insights regarding the dynamics of eye contact in dyadic interactions. In addition, the present study will provide specific results concerning the differential underpinnings of social interaction impairments in autism and social anxiety and thus might help to improve diagnostic and therapeutic procedures for these two disorders.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants