The Guilt Emotion Reduces the Gaze-Cueing Effect

Previous studies have found that the gaze-cueing effect, an enhancement of the reaction in detecting targets appearing in a gazed-at location compared with those appearing in other locations, can be modulated by prior social interaction. In the present study, we investigated whether a feeling of guilt established from prior interaction with a cueing face could modulate the gaze-cueing effect. Participants first completed a guilt-induction task using a modified dot-estimation paradigm to associate the feeling of guilt with a specific face, and then the face that established the binding relationship was used as the stimulus in a gaze-cueing task. The results showed that guilt-directed faces and control faces induce equal magnitudes of gaze-cueing effect in 200 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), while guilt-directed faces induce a smaller gaze-cueing effect than control faces in 700 ms SOA. These findings provide evidence for the role of social factors on the gaze-cueing effect.