The present study aimed to investigate the impact of facial expression, gaze interaction, and gender on attention allocation, physiological arousal, facial muscle responses, and emotional experience in simulated social interactions. Participants viewed animated virtual characters varying in terms of gender, gaze interaction, and facial expression. We recorded facial EMG, fixation duration, pupil size, and subjective experience. Subject's rapid facial reactions (RFRs) differentiated more clearly between the character's happy and angry expression in the condition of mutual eye-to-eye contact. This finding provides evidence for the idea that RFRs are not simply motor responses, but part of an emotional reaction. Eye movement data showed that fixations were longer in response to both angry and neutral faces than to happy faces, thereby suggesting that attention is preferentially allocated to cues indicating potential threat during social interaction.

The distractor effect is an inhibition of saccades shortly after a sudden visual event. It has been explained both as an oculomotor reflex and as a manifestation of the orienting response. To clarify which explanation is more appropriate, we investigated a possible habituation of this effect. Visual and auditory distractors were presented at gaze-contingent intervals during the perception of meaningful pictures. Both reflexlike and modifiable components were present in the visual distractor effect, with latencies of about 110 and 180 ms, respectively. The influence of visual and auditory distractors on saccades preceded the earliest changes in cortical ERPs. Only for long-term habituation in the visual modality was a correlation with ERPs (N1) found.

Most empirical evidence on attentional control is based on brief presentations of rather abstract stimuli. Results revealed indications for a dynamic interplay between bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms. Here we used a more naturalistic task to examine temporal signatures of attentional mechanisms on fine and coarse time scales. Subjects had to inspect digitized copies of 60 paintings, each shown for 40 s. We simultaneously measured oculomotor behavior and electrophysiological correlates of brain activity to compare early and late intervals (1) of inspection time of each picture (picture viewing) and (2) of the full experiment (time on task). For picture viewing, we found an increase in fixation duration and a decrease of saccadic amplitude while these parameters did not change with time on task. Furthermore, early in picture viewing we observed higher spatial and temporal similarity of gaze behavior. Analyzing electrical brain activity revealed changes in three components (C1, N1 and P2) of the eye fixation-related potential (EFRP); during picture viewing; no variation was obtained for the power in the frontal beta- and in the theta activity. Time on task analyses demonstrated no effects on the EFRP amplitudes but an increase of power in the frontal theta and beta band activity. Thus, behavioral and electrophysiological measures similarly show characteristic changes during picture viewing, indicating a shifting balance of its underlying (bottom-up and top-down) attentional mechanisms. Time on task also modulated top-down attention but probably represents a different attentional mechanism.

Emotion regulation (ER) can be conceptualized as any process by which individuals modify their emotional experiences, expressions, and physiology (Gross, 1998). Individuals encounter situations every day in which they have to regulate emotions. To achieve this, people can choose from a variety of strategies: situation selection, situation modification,

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