Poster No:
652
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Jiaqi Zhang1, Yifan Wang2, Hanxuan Zhao3, Haijun Duan2
Institutions:
1East China Normal University, Shanghai, Shanghai, 2Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 3Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, Shanghai
First Author:
Jiaqi Zhang
East China Normal University
Shanghai, Shanghai
Co-Author(s):
Yifan Wang
Shaanxi Normal University
Xi'an, Shaanxi
Hanxuan Zhao
Shanghai International Studies University
Shanghai, Shanghai
Introduction:
Lovers always seem to have some sort of connection with each other. Sometimes a simple gaze is all it takes to reach mutual understanding. When facing with stress, looking into the lovers' eyes gives the strength to buck up and solve problems. What made those loving eyes so powerful and magical? In the current study, we took a further look into the effect of eye contact between romantic couples on creative problem-solving under stress and reveal its underlying neural mechanisms by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning.
Methods:
51 heterosexual romantic couples falling in love for 6 months or shorter were recruited and randomly assigned to gazing and control groups. They took a rest and finished a pretest, including the Alternative Uses Test (AUT) to reflect creative problem-solving (Duan et al., 2019) and the Object Characteristics Task (OCT) as the corresponding control task (Lu et al., 2020a and 2020b). Then the Trier Social Stress Test for Group was used to induce stress (von Dawans et al., 2011), followed by a posttest of AUT and OCT.
We collected salivary cortisol level and heart rates to check stress-induction validity. The LABNIRS (Shimadzu Co., Japan) was used for the fluctuation of oxyhemoglobin (HbO) and deoxyhemoglobin. The preprocessing included hemodynamic response function low-pass filtering for autocorrelation correction, and the Wavelet-MDL for physiological activity and motion artifacts correction (Ye et al., 2009). After preprocessing, the wavelet transform coherence algorithm was used to calculate the coherence between two lovers' HbO time series (Nozawa et al., 2016). For emotion changes, we not only used self-reported subjective measurement, but analyzed facial expressions by FaceReader (FR) to capture the objective emotional fluctuation as well.
Results:
The physiological and subjective measurement proved the validity of stress induction. When facing with stress, the gazing group showed higher fluency and index of convergence (IOC) than the control group. FR analysis showed happy emotion of control group decreased after stress, but that of gazing group remained. In the post AUT, the gazing group reported higher positive emotions, lower anxiety and better subjective feelings for cooperation than the control group.
Neural evidence suggested significant higher interbrain synchronization (IBS) during post AUT on frontopolar cortex (FPC) and supramarginal gyrus (SMG) but lower IBS in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in gazing group than in control group. A stronger intrabrain functional connection (intra-FC) was observed in the gazing group than the control group, along with higher clustering coefficient (C), characteristic path length (L), local efficiency and small-worldness but lower global efficiency (Eg), indicating a much closer locally connected brain network in gazing group. The Granger causality analysis found significant directionality from males to females only in the gazing group.
Further gender difference analysis revealed higher intra-FC and greater C, L and lower Eg in males than in females. The intra-FC of both genders were clustered into 3 states by k-means. Compared with control group, the loose network occurs much less in gazing group for both genders. Specifically, the locally-connected state's occurrence increases in males, while the globally-connected state increment was observed in females.
Conclusions:
To conclude, eye contact with lover alleviated couples' mental stress, strengthened cooperative efforts and thus enhanced creative problem-solving. The neural substrates may be the IBS increment in SMG and FPC, the IBS decrease in dlPFC and close locally connected brain networks in gazing group. The information flow from male to female was observed. Gaze induced highly effective brain-network states, evoking locally-connected states in males and globally-connected states in females, which may explain the occurrence of the male-leading, female-supporting cooperative pattern with eye contact.
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Social Interaction 1
Social Neuroscience Other
Higher Cognitive Functions:
Reasoning and Problem Solving 2
Higher Cognitive Functions Other
Novel Imaging Acquisition Methods:
NIRS
Keywords:
Other - Romantic couples; Eye contact; Acute stress; Creative problem-solving; fNIRS hyperscanning
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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Please indicate below if your study was a "resting state" or "task-activation” study.
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Healthy subjects only or patients (note that patient studies may also involve healthy subjects):
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Was this research conducted in the United States?
No
Were any human subjects research approved by the relevant Institutional Review Board or ethics panel?
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Were any animal research approved by the relevant IACUC or other animal research panel?
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Other, Please specify
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functional near-infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS
Provide references using APA citation style.
Duan, H. (2019). Effects of acute stress on divergent and convergent problem-solving. Thinking & Reasoning, 26(1), 68-86.
Lu, K. (2020a). Gender of partner affects the interaction pattern during group creative idea generation. Experimental Brain Research, 238(5), 1157-1168.
Lu, K. (2020b). Creating while taking turns, the choice to unlocking group creative potential. NeuroImage, 219, 117025.
Nozawa, T. (2016). Interpersonal frontopolar neural synchronization in group communication: an exploration toward fNIRS hyperscanning of natural interactions. Neuroimage, 133, 484-497.
von Dawans, B. (2011). The Trier Social Stress Test for Groups (TSST-G): A new research tool for controlled simultaneous social stress exposure in a group format. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 36(4), 514-522.
Ye, J.C. (2009). NIRS-SPM: Statistical parametric mapping for near-infrared spectroscopy. NeuroImage, 44, 428-447.
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