'Correlates of Social Attention' (AsPredicted #55857)
Author(s) Marius Rubo (University of Würzburg, Germany) - marius.rubo@unifr.ch
Pre-registered on 2021/01/14 - 09:23 AM (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? Previous studies found that when viewing images or videos showing naturalistic scenes with people in it, there are stable differences between viewers in the extent to which they gaze at the depicted people's faces (i.e., some viewers do this more, others less, relatively regardless of each scene's context). However, relatively little is known how traits which are related to social cognition are associated with this tendency to look at faces.
In this study participants will view 20 images depicting a person in context. Attention will not be assessed via eye-tracking, but images will be displayed at high acuity only where the cursor is placed and participants' cursor movements will be recorded. Following previous research, cursor position will serve as a proxy of where participants attended to or looked at in each moment in time.
I hypothesize that there will be high internal consistency in the amount of time spent looking at the faces across different images, both for all images and those where the depicted person shows direct and averted gaze (10 images in each category). I furthermore hypothesize that several of the questionnaires listed below will be predictive of this gaze behavior, but due to redundancy between questionnaires, the most predictive model will only include some of them. In a second study, I will reduce the number of questionnaires to only include those with some predictive value for viewing behavior in study 1, and test if findings from study 1 can be corroborated.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. In the first study, I will test all of the following questionnaires which have some evidence for being linked to social cognition and possibly social attention:
• symptoms of depression (Patient Health Questionnaire; PHQ-9; Kroenke, Spitzer, & Williams, 2001;
Grafe, Zipfel, Herzog, & Lowe, 2004)
• social anxiety (short version of the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale; SIAS-6; Peters, Sunderland,
Andrews, Rapee, & Mattick, 2012),
• trait anxiety (trait part of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAI, Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene,
Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983),
• impulsivity (Barratt Impulsiveness Scale; BIS-15; Meule, Vögele, & Kübler, 2011)
• rejection sensitivity (Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire, RSQ, Downey & Feldman, 1996),
• empathizing and systemizing using the (Empathy Quotient and Systemizing Quotient; EQ-10 and
SQ-R-10; Greenberg, Warrier, Allison, & Baron-Cohen (2018)]
• Alexithymia (Toronto Alexithymia Scale; TAS-20; Franz, Schneider, Schäfer, Schmitz, & Zweyer,
2001)
• eating psychopathology (Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, EDE-Q, Kliem et al., 2016)
• The Big-5 personality dimensions (Big Five Inventory; BFI-K; Rammstedt & John, 2005)
• General Knowledge (10 questions each on history, economy, culture and science, obtained from
Trepte & Verbeet, 2010)
• Social value orientation (Murphy, Ackermann, & Handgraaf, 2011)
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? All participants view all images and answer the same questionnaires. This is a correlational study.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. I will run a stepwise regression to test which combination of questionnaires is most predictive of gaze behavior. I will use cross-validation, rather than mere fitting, to determine the best model. Additionally, I will test in a simple regression if impulsivity is predictive of scanpath length.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. I will exclude participants who have scores higher than the diagnostic cut-off in clinical questionnaires, finish the study very fast (<3SD of the mean), or are not better at answering knowledge questions than chance.
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. I plan to test 60 participants in each study. Participants can access the experiment through a web link. Number of participants will be checked once a week and the survey will be taken down from the server as soon as at least 60 participants have participated.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) I will add 6 additional items which are not part of any questionnaire yet and exploratively investigate if they are associated with social attention:
- Es ist mir wichtig, dass ich bei meinem Beruf mit Menschen zu tun habe.
- Ein Beruf, bei dem ich den ganzen Tag vor dem Computer sitze, wäre für mich schwer aushaltbar.
- Ärzte und Psychologen sollten gute mathematische Kenntnisse besitzen, damit sie aktuelle Studienergebnisse verstehen können.
- Der Wohlstand in unserer Gesellschaft beruht in erster Linie auf den Leistungen technischer Berufsgruppen.
- Wenn die Leute mehr auf die Gefühle anderer Menschen achten würden, gäbe es weniger Probleme auf der Welt.
- Wenn ich an einem Tag mit zu vielen Leuten reden musste, brauche ich ein paar Tage Ruhe, ehe ich wieder Lust auf sozialen Kontakt habe.
