How the fear of COVID-19 changed the way we look at human faces

The fear of COVID-19 contagion: an exploratory EEG-fMRI study

Pandemics have the potential to change how people behave and feel. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception; thus, it may serve as a "challenging context" for understanding how pandemics affect people's minds. In this study, we used high-density electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural correlates of fear of contagion during the most critical moments of COVID-19 in Italy (i.e., October 2020-May 2021). To do that, we stimulated participants (N = 17; nine females) with artificial-intelligence-generated faces of people presented as healthy, recovered from COVID-19, or infected by SARS-CoV-2. The fMRI results documented a modulation of large bilateral fronto-temporo-parietal functional brain networks. Critically, we found selective recruitment of cortical (e.g., frontal lobes) and subcortical fear-related structures (e.g., amygdala and putamen) of the so-called social brain network when participants observed COVID-19-related faces. Consistently, EEG results showed distinct patterns of brain activity selectively associated with infected and recovered faces (e.g., delta and gamma rhythm). Together, these results highlight how pandemic contexts may reverberate in the human brain, thus influencing most basic social and cognitive functioning. This may explain the emergence of a cluster of psychopathologies during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study underscores the need for prompt interventions to address pandemics' short- and long-term consequences on mental health.

An exploration of happiness, anxiety symptoms, and depressive symptoms among older adults during the coronavirus pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions of people worldwide. Because of the challenges associated with the pandemic, universal levels of happiness have likely depleted. We know little about how those with prior existing mental health concerns have responded to the pandemic. Using cross-sectional (study 1; N = 1,366) and longitudinal (study 2; N = 262) data, we utilized a stress and resilience perspective to explore mental health symptoms and happiness among older adults before and after the declaration of the pandemic. Results for both studies indicated higher levels of depression and anxiety symptoms predicted lower levels of happiness; however, for those who indicated higher levels of mental health symptoms, post-pandemic declaration happiness levels were higher than pre-pandemic happiness levels. Findings suggest that resilience may be learned throughout a lifetime, and that experiences from prior stressors may show benefits in responding to future ones, even among vulnerable populations.

Behavioral and physiological sensitivity to natural sick faces

The capacity to rapidly detect and avoid sick people may be adaptive. Given that faces are reliably available, as well as rapidly detected and processed, they may provide health information that influences social interaction. Prior studies used faces that were manipulated to appear sick (e.g., editing photos, inducing inflammatory response); however, responses to naturally sick faces remain largely unexplored. We tested whether adults detected subtle cues of genuine, acute, potentially contagious illness in face photos compared to the same individuals when healthy. We tracked illness symptoms and severity with the Sickness Questionnaire and Common Cold Questionnaire. We also checked that sick and healthy photos were matched on low-level features. We found that participants (N = 109) rated sick faces, compared to healthy faces, as sicker, more dangerous, and eliciting more unpleasant feelings. Participants (N = 90) rated sick faces as more likely to be avoided, more tired, and more negative in expression than healthy faces. In a passive-viewing eye-tracking task, participants (N = 50) looked longer at healthy than sick faces, especially the eye region, suggesting people may be more drawn to healthy conspecifics. When making approach-avoidance decisions, participants (N = 112) had greater pupil dilation to sick than healthy faces, and more pupil dilation was associated with greater avoidance, suggesting elevated arousal to threat. Across all experiments, participants' behaviors correlated with the degree of sickness, as reported by the face donors, suggesting a nuanced, fine-tuned sensitivity. Together, these findings suggest that humans may detect subtle threats of contagion from sick faces, which may facilitate illness avoidance. By better understanding how humans naturally avoid illness in conspecifics, we may identify what information is used and ultimately improve public health.

The visual encoding of graspable unfamiliar objects

We explored by eye-tracking the visual encoding modalities of participants (N = 20) involved in a free-observation task in which three repetitions of ten unfamiliar graspable objects were administered. Then, we analysed the temporal allocation (t = 1500 ms) of visual-spatial attention to objects' manipulation (i.e., the part aimed at grasping the object) and functional (i.e., the part aimed at recognizing the function and identity of the object) areas. Within the first 750 ms, participants tended to shift their gaze on the functional areas while decreasing their attention on the manipulation areas. Then, participants reversed this trend, decreasing their visual-spatial attention to the functional areas while fixing the manipulation areas relatively more. Crucially, the global amount of visual-spatial attention for objects' functional areas significantly decreased as an effect of stimuli repetition while remaining stable for the manipulation areas, thus indicating stimulus familiarity effects. These findings support the action reappraisal theoretical approach, which considers object/tool processing as abilities emerging from semantic, technical/mechanical, and sensorimotor knowledge integration.

Masked face is looking at me: Face mask increases the feeling of being looked at during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background

As the COVID-19 global pandemic unfolded, governments recommended wearing face masks as a protective measure. Recent studies have found that a face mask influences perception; but how it affects social perception, especially the judgment of being looked at, is still unknown. This study investigated how wearing a mask influences the judgment of gaze direction by conducting a cone of direct gaze (CoDG) task.

Methods

In Experiment 1, three types of masked faces were considered to investigate whether the effect of masks on CoDG is modulated by mask types. Experiment 2 was to further validate the results of Experiment 1 by adding a learning phase to help participants better distinguish N95 and surgical masks. Furthermore, to investigate whether the effect of masks derives from its social significance, a face with only the eye-region (a mouth-cut face) was used as the stimuli in Experiment 3.

Results

The results of Experiment 1 found that wearing masks widens the CoDG, irrespective of the mask type. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1. Experiment 3 found that the CoDG of N95-masked faces was wider than the mouth-cut and non-masked faces, while no significant difference existed between the CoDG of mouth-cut and non-masked faces, illustrating that the influence of wearing masks on CoDG was due to high-level social significance rather than low-level facial feature information.

Conclusion

The results show that face mask increases the feeling of being looked at during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The present findings are of significance for understanding the impact of wearing masks on human social cognition in the context of COVID-19.

Rhinoplasty Pre-Surgery Models by Using Low-Dose Computed Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and 3D Printing

Rhinoplasty and surgical reconstruction of cartilaginous structures still remain a great challenge today. This study aims to identify an imaging strategy in order to merge the information from CT scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisitions and build a 3D printed model true to the patient's anatomy, for better surgical planning. Using MRI, information can be obtained about the cartilage structures of which the nose is composed. Ten rhinoplasty candidate patients underwent both a low-dose protocol CT scan and a specific MRI for characterization of nasal structures. Bone and soft tissue segmentations were performed in CT, while cartilage segmentations were extrapolated from MRI and validated by both an expert radiologist and surgeon. Subsequently, a 3D model was produced in materials and colors reproducing the density of the three main structures (bone, soft tissue, and cartilage), useful for pre-surgical evaluation. This study has highlighted that the optimization of a CT and MR dedicated protocol has allowed to reduce the CT radiation dose up to 60% compared to standard acquisitions with the same machine, and MR acquisition time of about 20%. Patient-tailored 3D models and pre-surgical planning have reduced the mean operative time by 20 minutes.

Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic

Interacting with others wearing a face mask has become a regular worldwide practice since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the impact of face masks on cognitive mechanisms supporting social interaction is still largely unexplored. In the present work, we focused on gaze cueing of attention, a phenomenon tapping the essential ability which allows individuals to orient their attentional resources in response to eye gaze signals coming from others. Participants from both a European (i.e., Italy; Experiment 1) and an Asian (i.e., China; Experiment 2) country were involved, namely two countries in which the daily use of face masks before COVID-19 pandemic was either extremely uncommon or frequently adopted, respectively. Both samples completed a task in which a peripheral target had to be discriminated while a task irrelevant averted gaze face, wearing a mask or not, acted as a central cueing stimulus. Overall, a reliable and comparable gaze cueing emerged in both experiments, independent of the mask condition. These findings suggest that gaze cueing of attention is preserved even when the person perceived is wearing a face mask.

Semantic congruency effects of prime words on tool visual exploration

Most recent research on human tool use highlighted how people might integrate multiple sources of information through different neurocognitive systems to exploit the environment for action. This mechanism of integration is known as "action reappraisal". In the present eye-tracking study, we further tested the action reappraisal idea by devising a word-priming paradigm to investigate how semantically congruent (e.g., "nail") vs. semantically incongruent words (e.g., "jacket") that preceded the vision of tools (e.g., a hammer) may affect participants' visual exploration of them. We found an implicit modulation of participants' temporal allocation of visuospatial attention as a function of the object-word consistency. Indeed, participants tended to increase over time their fixations on tools' manipulation areas under semantically congruent conditions. Conversely, participants tended to concentrate their visual-spatial attention on tools' functional areas when inconsistent object-word pairs were presented. These results support and extend the information-integrated perspective of the action reappraisal approach. Also, these findings provide further evidence about how higher-level semantic information may influence tools' visual exploration.