Highlights  Parkinson's disease is associated with significant social perceptual impairment. The magnitude of this impairment is broadly equivalent across facial and prosodic modalities. Social perceptual impairment is evident for all six basic emotions, but is generally greater for negatively valanced emotions. Both dopaminergic medication and subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation are associated with poorer social perceptual function.

Given limitations in the amount of visual information that a person can simultaneously process through to conscious perception, selective visual attention is necessary. Visual signals in the environment aid this selection process by triggering reflexive shifts of covert attention to locations of potential importance. One such signal appears to be others' eye gaze. Indeed, a gaze-cueing effect, whereby healthy adults respond faster to targets that are presented at locations cued rather than miscued by eye gaze has been consistently observed in the empirical literature. Critically though, the influences of task and cue features on this effect are not well understood. To address this gap, we report a meta-analytic integration of 423 gaze-cueing effects using a multilevel approach. A gaze-cueing effect emerged across all levels of the assessed task and cue features, indicating that others' eye gaze reliably directs observers' attention. We found that the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect was moderated by whether direct gaze cues preceded directional gaze cues or not; the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), whether participants had to detect, localize, or categorize targets; and the cue's facial expression. Whether or not the gaze cue remained on screen after the target appeared, and whether schematic faces, computer-generated faces, or images of real faces were used as cues, did not appear to reliably function as moderators. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, particularly in relation to the social attention system. Public Significance StatementThe findings from this meta-analysis provide the strongest evidence to date that others' eye gaze is a powerful social cue that reliably directs observers to reflexively shift their own visual attention such that they engage in joint attention with the gazing person. The findings also provide insights into the specific circumstances in which this reflexive gaze-cued attention is enhanced.

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Both alcohol misuse and the externally oriented thinking (EOT) facet of alexithymia are associated with deficits in facial emotion recognition and emotional empathy. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether EOT mediates the association of drinking with these deficits, and to test the hypothesis that impaired facial emotion recognition mediates the relationship between EOT and low emotional empathy, in a non-clinical sample. The sample was comprised of 161 men and women who completed an online survey which included the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), Depression Anxiety Stress Scales, Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), and Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). In addition to replicating associations between TAS-20 and other measures, EOT was found to mediate relationships between potential alcohol misuse (as indexed by AUDIT) and facial emotion recognition (as indexed by RMET) as well as emotional empathy (as indexed by the corresponding subscale of the IRI) after controlling for mood and demographic variables. The negative relationship between EOT and emotional empathy was mediated by impaired facial emotion recognition. Present findings point to a likely role of the EOT trait in the reported associations of alcohol misuse with both poor emotion recognition and low emotional empathy, and a mediating role of poor emotion recognition in the relationship of EOT to the latter. Alexithymia and emotion recognition 3 Alexithymia, a personality trait involving difficulties in identifying and describing one's own emotional feelings and an externally oriented or concrete thinking style (Taylor,

Objective: A large literature now shows that Alzheimer’s disease (AD) disrupts a number of social cognitive abilities, including social perceptual function and theory of mind (ToM). However, less well understood is how the specific subcomponents of ToM as well as both the broader and specific subcomponents of empathic processing are affected. Method: The current study provides the first meta-analytic review of AD that focuses on both empathy and ToM as broad constructs, as well as their overlapping (cognitive empathy and affective ToM) and distinct (affective empathy and cognitive ToM) subcomponents. Results: Aggregated across 31 studies, the results revealed that, relative to controls, AD is associated with large-sized deficits in both cognitive ToM (g = 1.09) and affective ToM/cognitive empathy (g = 0.76). However, no statistical differences were found between the AD participants and controls on affective empathic abilities (g = 0.36). Conclusions: These data point to a potentially important disconnect between core aspects of social cognitive processing in people with AD. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.