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Published on: November 11, 2022
Differential impact of trait, social, and attachment anxiety on the stare-in-the-crowd effect
Nicolas Burra1, Solene Massait2, Pascal Vrtička3
1Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland. Nicolas.Burra@unige.ch.
Abstract:
Eye gaze conveys crucial information for social interactions, with straight versus averted gaze triggering distinct emotional and cognitive processes. The "stare-in-the-crowd" effect exemplifies such differential visual processing of gaze direction, in more recent reports also in interaction with head orientation. Besides aiming at replicating the "stare-in-the-crowd" effect by means of an eye gaze by head orientation interaction, the present study intended to for the first time testing its susceptibility to inter-individual differences in trait, social, and attachment anxiety. Our findings reveal a significant relation between the "stare-in-the-crowd" effect and social and attachment, but not trait anxiety, and therefore provide preliminary cues for personality influences on visual processing of eye gaze and head orientation.
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