Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit a range of verbal and nonverbal impairments during social interaction, which contribute to reduced interaction quality and broader social dysfunction. To optimize clinical interventions, it is essential to identify the mechanisms underlying these deficits. Building on previous findings demonstrating reduced emotional mimicry in schizophrenia, the present study examined whether gaze aversion is associated with instances of failed mimicry during naturalistic conversation. In a within-partner design, interacting partners (n = 20) each engaged in one conversation with an individual with schizophrenia (n = 20) and one with a matched healthy control (n = 20). Prior analyses using OpenFace-based video coding revealed diminished emotional mimicry in the schizophrenia group. In the present study, the same video recordings were reanalyzed using FaceReader to extract gaze direction. We specifically examined gaze aversion during the interaction and, more critically, during episodes of failed mimicry, defined as instances in which participants did not reciprocate their partner's smile. Results indicated that although individuals with schizophrenia did not display significantly greater overall gaze aversion across the entire interaction, they exhibited significantly greater gaze aversion when their partner was smiling. This pattern was associated with a higher proportion of failed mimicry accompanied by gaze aversion in the schizophrenia group compared to controls. These findings suggest that reduced visual attention may represent one mechanism contributing to emotional mimicry deficits in schizophrenia. Clinical implications are discussed, along with the potential role of stigma in exacerbating these processes.
Cognitive biases are implicated in the maintenance of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), yet findings from reaction-time paradigms remain mixed. Eye-tracking offers a direct window into these attentional processes. We examined symptom-specific attentional patterns in university students selected for high vs. low contamination fear (HCF n = 10, LCF n = 10) and high vs. low checking (HC n = 10, LC n = 10) from a screened sample (N = 774). Participants viewed symptom-matched (disgust or checking) and general threat pairs against neutral images. Attentional bias was indexed as vigilance (first fixation and latency), disengagement (first-fixation duration), and maintenance (fixation count and total duration). Results indicated that attentional biases were primarily evident during the maintenance stage rather than early orienting. For the contamination dimension, significant interaction emerged for maintenance. Specifically, HCF participants demonstrated significantly reduced gaze maintenance for disgust images compared to threat and neutral images, consistent with a vigilance-avoidance pattern suggestive of attentional avoidance. For the checking dimension, while significant main effects for image type indicated rapid orienting to checking cues and sustained viewing of checking and threat-related images across all participants, these effects were not significantly moderated by symptom group. Findings indicate that attentional bias in OCD is heterogeneous and partially distinct across symptom subtypes. These results underscore the value of symptom-matched stimuli and gaze metrics, support cognitive bias modification to symptom dimensions, and highlight eye-tracking as a useful tool for parsing vigilance, disengagement, and maintenance. Limitations, clinical implications, and future directions are discussed.
Exposure to a stressful trauma after successful treatment can lead to relapse, known as fear reinstatement. In the laboratory, fear reinstatement involves re-exposing individuals to an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US) after successful extinction learning, leading to the reinstatement of fear to a previously threatening conditioned stimulus (CS). While fear reinstatement is typically thought to evoke the return of old fear, preliminary evidence suggests that using a qualitatively different US during reinstatement can elicit new fear (i.e., this new US is expected to follow the CS instead of the US used in training). This study aimed to expand on this finding by examining safety behaviors, a behavioral response that minimizes US onset. To this end, participants first acquired conditioned fear and safety behaviors to the CS, followed by extinction learning to it. On the second day, some participants encountered a novel reinstatement US (Cross-US), while others received either the same US as in acquisition for reinstatement (Same-US) or no reinstatement manipulation (No-US). After reinstatement manipulation, the Cross-US group showed a larger increase in US avoidance and US expectancy to the novel US compared to the other groups. Our findings suggest that reinstatement elicits new fear and safety behaviors, underlying that treatment might benefit from addressing a range of safety behaviors.
