Only human after all? a pre-registered study on gaze behavior and humanity attributions to people with facial difference.

There is a great deal of indirect evidence suggesting that people with facial difference (FD) may be dehumanized. This research aimed to provide direct evidence of the dehumanization of people with FD based on the stigmatizing reactions they elicit. More precisely, previous findings revealed that the specific way people with FD are looked upon is related to the feelings of disgust they elicit. Since disgust fosters dehumanization, our aim was to confirm the modified pattern of visual attention towards people with FD and to determine whether it was also related to humanness perception. For that purpose, a preregistered eye-tracking study (N = 97) using a former experimental design extended to humanity attributions was conducted. This research replicates findings showing that the face of people with FD is explored differently in comparison with other human faces. However, the hypothesis that people with FD were given fewer humanity attributions was not supported. Therefore, the hypothesis of a "dehumanizing gaze" towards people with FD-beyond humanity-related attributions-is discussed in light of these findings.

Organizational Culture, Justice, Dehumanization and Affective Commitment in French Employees: A Serial Mediation Model.

The instrumentality of employees can be considered a common feature of the modern workplace. To investigate the influence of this instrumentalizing culture on organizational performance on the individual level, we tested whether perceived clan values (according to the Competing Values Framework) could explain affective commitment directly and indirectly through perceptions of organizational justice and organizational dehumanization in employees. Using the PROCESS macro, we tested a corresponding serial mediation model in a convenience sample of 306 French employees. Although employees who perceived a lack of clan values were less committed, the observed indirect effect was greater. Our findings highlight the role of perceived organizational culture in influencing affective commitment and how perceived justice and dehumanization may explain part of this relationship. This research also contradicts widespread beliefs stating dehumanizing strategies are universally beneficial in terms of organizational efficiency. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

Workplace Aesthetic Appreciation and Exhaustion in a COVID-19 Vaccination Center: The Role of Positive Affects and Interest in Art.

BACKGROUND: Recently, workers employed in vaccination points around the world have been subjected to very high workloads to counter the progress of the COVID-19 epidemic. This workload has a negative effect on their well-being. Environmental psychology studies have shown how the physical characteristics of the workplace environment can influence employees' well-being. Furthermore, studies in the psychology of art show how art can improve the health of individuals. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this research was to test a moderated mediation model to verify how appreciation of workplace aesthetics can impact the level of exhaustion of staff working in a vaccination center, the mediating role of positive and negative affects, and the moderating role of interest in art. METHODS: Data were collected from a sample of 274 workers (physicians, nurses, reception, and administrative staff) working in the same vaccination center in Italy. Participants answered a self-report questionnaire during a rest break. We used a cross-sectional design. RESULTS: The results show that appreciation of workplace aesthetics impacts employees' level of exhaustion. This relationship is mediated by positive and negative affects, and interest in art moderates the relationship between positive affects and exhaustion. CONCLUSIONS: These findings indicate the central role of workplace aesthetics in influencing healthcare workers' well-being, and how interest in art can reduce exhaustion levels. Practical implications of the results are discussed.

Towards a better understanding of the social stigma of facial difference.

Facial difference (FD) is not only an individual experience; it is inherently social, reflecting interactions between social norms and individual attitudes. Often FD is stigmatized. In this paper, we employ a widely used stigma framework, namely the social stigma framework put forth by Pryor and Reeder (2011), to unpack the stigma of FD. This framework posits that there are four forms of stigma: public stigma, self-stigma, stigma by association, and structural stigma. We first discuss the social and psychological literature on FD as it pertains to these various forms of stigma. We then describe coping approaches for FD stigma. Lastly, we delineate evidence-based methods for addressing the various forms of FD stigma, such that future efforts can more effectively tackle the stigma of facial difference.

Look me in the eyes! A pre-registered eye-tracking study investigating visual attention and affective reactions to faces with a visible difference.

This research aims to determine how disfigurement alters visual attention paid to faces and to examine whether such a potential modified pattern of visual attention to faces with visible difference was associated, in turn, with perceiver's stigmatizing affective reactions. A pilot study (N = 38) and a pre-registered experimental eye-tracking study (N = 89) were conducted. First, the visual explorations of faces with and without disfigurement were compared. The association of these visual explorations with affective reactions were investigated next. Findings suggest that disfigurement impacts visual attention toward faces; attention is not merely attracted to the disfigured area but it is also diverted particularly from the eye area. Disfigurement also eases disgust-related, surprise-related, anxiety-related, and, to a lesser extent, hostility-related affective states. Exploratory interaction effects between attention to the eyes and to the disfigured part of the face revealed a hybrid effect on disgust-related affect and an increase in surprise-related affect when participants fixated more upon the disfigured area and fixated less upon the eyes. Thus, perceiver's attention is captured by disfigurement and also diverted from face internal features which seems to play a role in the affective reactions elicited.

Social influence on metacognitive evaluations: The power of nonverbal cues.

Metacognitive evaluations refer to the processes by which people assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goal. Little is known about whether this process is susceptible to social influence. Here we investigate whether nonverbal social signals spontaneously influence metacognitive evaluations. Participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice task, which was followed by a face randomly gazing towards or away from the response chosen by the participant. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation of their response by rating their confidence in their answer. In Experiment 1, the participants were told that the gaze direction was irrelevant to the task purpose and were advised to ignore it. The results revealed an effect of implicit social information on confidence ratings even though the gaze direction was random and therefore unreliable for task purposes. In addition, nonsocial cues (car) did not elicit this effect. In Experiment 2, the participants were led to believe that cue direction (face or car) reflected a previous participant's response to the same question-that is, the social information provided by the cue was made explicit, yet still objectively unreliable for the task. The results showed a similar social influence on confidence ratings, observed with both cues (car and face) but with an increased magnitude relative to Experiment 1. We additionally showed in Experiment 2 that social information impaired metacognitive accuracy. Together our results strongly suggest an involuntary susceptibility of metacognitive evaluations to nonverbal social information, even when it is implicit (Experiment 1) and unreliable (Experiments 1 and 2).

Source unreliability decreases but does not cancel the impact of social information on metacognitive evaluations.

Through metacognitive evaluations, individuals assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goals. We have previously shown that non-verbal social cues spontaneously influence these evaluations, even when the cues are unreliable. Here, we explore whether a belief about the reliability of the source can modulate this form of social impact. Participants performed a two-alternative forced choice task that varied in difficulty. The task was followed by a video of a person who was presented as being either competent or incompetent at performing the task. That person provided random feedback to the participant through facial expressions indicating agreement, disagreement or uncertainty. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation by rating their confidence in their answer. Results revealed that participants' confidence was higher following agreements. Interestingly, this effect was merely reduced but not canceled for the incompetent individual, even though participants were able to perceive the individual's incompetence. Moreover, perceived agreement induced zygomaticus activity, but only when the feedback was provided for difficult trials by the competent individual. This last result strongly suggests that people implicitly appraise the relevance of social feedback with respect to their current goal. Together, our findings suggest that people always integrate social agreement into their metacognitive evaluations, even when epistemic vigilance mechanisms alert them to the risk of being misinformed.

Influence of postural threat on postural responses to aversive visual stimuli.

Recent research has shown that emotion influences postural control. The objective of the present study was to establish whether or not postural threat influences postural and physiological responses to aversive visual stimuli. In order to investigate the coupling between emotional reactions, motivated behavior and postural responses, we studied the displacement of the subject's center of pressure (COP) and the changes in electrodermal activity (EDA), heart rate (HR) and postural muscle activation. Thirty-two participants (15 males, 17 females; mean ± SD age: 21.4 ± 2.3) viewed affective and neutral pictures while standing still on a force platform in the presence or absence of postural threat. The HR and EDA data revealed that the emotional state varied as a function of the postural condition. The mean displacement in the anteroposterior (AP) axis was more rearwards in response to aversive stimuli that in response to neutral stimuli, in both the absence of postural threat (-0.65 mm and +0.90 mm for aversive and neutral stimuli, respectively) and the presence of postural threat (-0.00 mm vs. +0.89 mm, respectively). An aversive stimulus was associated with a shorter AP COP sway path than a neutral stimulus in the presence of a postural threat (167.26 mm vs. 174.66 mm for aversive and neutral stimuli, respectively) but not in the latter's absence (155.85 mm vs. 154.48 mm, respectively). Our results evidenced withdrawal behavior in response to an aversive stimulus (relative to a neutral stimulus) in the absence of postural threat. Withdrawal behavior was attenuated (but nevertheless active) in the presence of a postural threat.

Postural correlates with painful situations.

BACKGROUND: Emotional context may play a crucial role in movement production. According to simulation theories, emotional states affect motor systems. The aim of this study was to compare postural responses assessed by posturography and electromyography when subjects were instructed to imagine themselves in a painful or a non-painful situation. METHODS: Twenty-nine subjects (22.3 ± 3.7 years) participated in this study. While standing quietly on a posturographic platform, they were instructed to imagine themselves in a painful or non-painful situation. Displacement of the center of pressure (COP), leg muscle electromyographic activity, heart rate, and electrodermal activity were assessed in response to painful and non-painful situations. RESULTS: The anteroposterior path was shorter (p < 0.05) when subjects imagined themselves in a painful situation (M = 148.0 ± 33.4 mm) compared to a non-painful situation (158.2 ± 38.7 mm). Higher tibialis anterior (TA) activity (RMS-TA = 3.38 ± 1.95% vs. 3.24 ± 1.85%; p < 0.001) and higher variability of soleus (SO) activity (variation coefficient of RMS-SO = 13.5 ± 16.2% vs. M = 9.0 ± 7.2%; p < 0.05) were also observed in painful compared to non-painful situations. No significant changes were observed for other physiological data. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates that simulation of painful situations induces changes in postural control and leg muscle activation compared to non-painful situations, as increased stiffness was demonstrated in response to aversive pictures in accordance with previous results.

Investigation of effects of face rotation on race processing: an ERPs study.

Recent ERP research has indicated that the processing of faces of other races (OR) and same race (SR) as the perceiver differs at the perceptual level, more precisely for the N170 component. The purpose of the present study was to continue the investigation of the race-of-face processing across multiple orientations. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and performance were recorded when Caucasian participants were required to categorize by race Caucasian and African faces presented in eight different angles of orientation. Three main observations were made: (1) the face-sensitive N170 is modulated by the race of faces, being larger in response to OR compared to SR faces; (2) face rotation affected this component in the same pattern for both racial groups; (3) the N170-ORE progressively disappeared as the faces moved away from their canonical orientation at the right hemisphere only. Thus, the current findings suggest that configural/holisitic information is extracted from faces of both racial groups, but that upright OR faces require increased demands.

Behavioral investigation of the influence of social categorization on empathy for pain: a minimal group paradigm study.

Research on empathy for pain has provided evidence of an empathic bias toward racial ingroup members. In this study, we used for the first time the "minimal group paradigm" in which participants were assigned to artificial groups and required to perform pain judgments of pictures of hands and feet in painful or non-painful situations from self, ingroup, and outgroup perspectives. Findings showed that the mere categorization of people into two distinct arbitrary social groups appears to be sufficient to elicit an ingroup bias in empathy for pain.

Asymmetric switch-costs and ERPs reveal facial identity dominance over expression.

Previous studies on face processing have revealed an asymmetric overlap between identity and expression, as identity is processed irrespective of expression while expression processing partly depends on identity. To investigate whether this relative interaction is caused by dominance of identity over expression, participants performed familiarity and expression judgments during task switching. This paradigm reveals task-set dominance with a paradoxical asymmetric switch-cost (i.e., greater difference between switch and repeat trials when switching toward the dominant task). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to find the neural signature of the asymmetric cost. As expected, greater switch-cost was shown in the familiarity task with respect to response times, indicating its dominance over the expression task. Moreover, a left-sided ERP correlate of this effect was observed at the level of the frontal N2 component, interpreted as an index of modulations in endogenous executive control. Altogether, these results confirm the overlap between identity and expression during face processing and further indicate their relative dominance.

Other-race and inversion effects during the structural encoding stage of face processing in a race categorization task: an event-related brain potential study.

To investigate the mechanisms underlying the other-race effect, in particular at what stage of face processing differences between same-race (SR) and other-race (OR) stimuli occur, electrophysiological and behavioral data were obtained on Caucasian participants viewing photographs of Caucasian, Asian, and African faces in upright and inverted orientations. During a race categorization task, reaction times were faster for African than Asian faces, and both of them faster than Caucasian ones, independent of their orientation. The face-sensitive N170 component was low in amplitude for Caucasian, intermediate for Asian, and maximal for African faces. The face inversion effect was observed for all ethnic groups on N170 amplitudes, but was more evident for Caucasian faces. According to the perceptual expertise hypothesis, our results indicate that SR faces involve more configural/holistic processing OR faces.

Social identity-based motivation modulates attention bias toward negative information: an event-related brain potential study.

Research has demonstrated that people readily pay more attention to negative than to positive and/or neutral stimuli. However, evidence from recent studies indicated that such an attention bias to negative information is not obligatory but sensitive to various factors. Two experiments using intergroup evaluative tasks (Study 1: a gender-related groups evaluative task and Study 2: a minimal-related groups evaluative task) was conducted to determine whether motivation to strive for a positive social identity - a part of one's self-concept - drives attention toward affective stimuli. Using the P1 component of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as a neural index of attention, we confirmed that attention bias toward negative stimuli is not mandatory but it can depend on a motivational focus on affective outcomes. Results showed that social identity-based motivation is likely to bias attention toward affectively incongruent information. Thereby, early onset processes - reflected by the P1 component - appeared susceptible to top-down attentional influences induced by the individual's motivation to strive for a positive social identity.

Perceptual interactions between visual processing of facial familiarity and emotional expression: an event-related potentials study during task-switching.

Models of face processing suggest that facial familiarity and expression processes involve independent visual systems. But under some conditions, the two processes interact, as when selective attention is solicited, and/or when a link is established between consecutive stimuli. To assess these assumptions during perceptual face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used while subjects discriminated either familiarity or expression in a task-switching paradigm. Switched trials were designed with competitor priming, the unattended dimension being previously attended. The results indicate interactions appearing in the right hemisphere during the perceptual encoding stage (N170) when subjects processed either familiarity or expression during switched trials. These interactions gain both hemispheres during memory retrieval (P2) and in terms of accuracy. Altogether, these results confirm the critical role of the right hemisphere in perceiving faces and their expressions. Moreover, they suggest that familiarity and expression can interact in both directions.