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Understanding which factors are consistently associated with the decision to vaccinate one's child is important to identify messages which should be targeted by public health communications about routine child vaccinations.

We investigated whether a fearful expression enhances the effect of another's gaze in directing the attention of an observer. Participants viewed photographs of faces whose gaze was directed ahead, to the left or to the right. Target letters then appeared unpredictably to the left or right. As expected, targets in the location indicated by gaze were detected more rapidly. In nonanxious volunteers the effects of fearful gaze did not differ from neutral gaze, but fearful expression had a more powerful influence in a selected high anxious group. Attention is thus more likely to be guided by the direction of fearful than neutral gaze, but only in anxiety-prone individuals.Observing another's direction of gaze often results in a congruent focus of attention on the part of the observer. This effect emerges quite early in life, and has been noted in infants as young as 3 months (Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998). When infants saw faces displayed on a computer whose eyes moved to the left or right, followed by a target stimulus on the same or the opposite side, saccades towards the target were faster if the observed gaze had been in the same direction. This early sensitivity to gaze direction was taken by the authors as consistent with the suggestion that detection of gaze is a biologically prepared ability, possibly controlled by a specialized brain module.In the experiment to be described here we investigated the influence of eye gaze in guiding attention in adult participants, with particular reference to the influence of facial expression displayed by the model, and the emotionality of the observer. As will be discussed later, we hypothesized that fearful gaze might be especially effective in guiding the attention of an observer to the same location, but particularly so in highly anxious individuals.We followed the general method described by a number of other researchers, albeit without reference to emotion. In an initial report by Friesen and Kingstone (1998), schematically drawn faces with blanked eyes were displayed centrally for 680 ms, after which the eye pupils appeared, apparently looking straight ahead, to the left or to the right. With a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 105, 300, 600, or 1005 ms, a target letter (F or T) appeared unpredictably but with equal frequency on the left or right side of the screen. For each SOA except the longest, detection times were significantly faster when targets were in the location consistent with gaze direction, despite instructions that eye gaze was not in fact predictive. There were no significant differences between the conditions when gaze was straight ahead and when targets appeared UKPMC Funders Group Author Manuscript UKPMC Funders Group Author Manuscriptin the gaze-incongruent location, at any SOA. That is, there were significant benefits of cueing by gaze direction with an SOA of 105-600 ms, but no significant costs when gaze and targets were in opposing locations.Two further series broadly confirming these findings were reported by Driver, Davis, Ricciard...

This study investigated the role of neutral, happy, fearful, and angry facial expressions in enhancing orienting to the direction of eye gaze. Photographs of faces with either direct or averted gaze were presented. A target letter (T or L) appeared unpredictably to the left or the right of the face, either 300 ms or 700 ms after gaze direction changed. Response times were faster in congruent conditions (i.e., when the eyes gazed toward the target) relative to incongruent conditions (when the eyes gazed away from the target letter). Facial expression did influence reaction times, but these effects were qualified by individual differences in self-reported anxiety. High trait-anxious participants showed an enhanced orienting to the eye gaze of faces with fearful expressions relative to all other expressions. In contrast, when the eyes stared straight ahead, trait anxiety was associated with slower responding when the facial expressions depicted anger. Thus, in anxiety-prone people attention is more likely to be held by an expression of anger, whereas attention is guided more potently by fearful facial expressions. Keywords emotion; facial expression; gaze direction; anxiety; attentional orienting Facial expressions are potent social cues and are ideal stimuli to investigate how emotionally relevant information is prioritized over other information in attentional and perceptual processing (Vuilleumier, 2002). Strong individual differences have, however, been found in the processing of facial expressions of emotion. To illustrate, several studies have shown that individual differences in trait anxiety are associated with an increased propensity to orient attention toward facial expressions of threat (e.g., Bradley, Mogg, & Millar, 2000;Fox, 2002;Mogg & Bradley, 1999) and that amygdala response to threatening facial expressions is also modulated by the magnitude of self-reported anxiety (Bishop, Duncan, & Lawrence, 2004;Etkin et al., 2004). In a typical study, a dot-probe paradigm is used in which pairs of faces differing in expression are presented simultaneously on a computer screen for 500 ms and are immediately followed by a probe. Probes appearing in the location previously occupied by a threatening stimulus (e.g., threat word or facial expression) are detected faster by anxious individuals than probes appearing in the location of a neutral or positive stimulus (e.g., a happy face). Low-anxious people usually show no bias on this task, although sometimes they show an attentional vigilance for positive material (e.g., Fox, 1993;MacLeod & Mathews, 1988). This speeding to detect an object appearing near the location of threat has been well established in people with generalized anxiety disorder (e.g., MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986;Mogg, Bradley, & Williams, 1995) and social phobia (e.g., Mogg, Philippot, & Bradley, 2004), as well as in nonclinical groups reporting high levels of trait anxiety (e.g., Fox, 1993;Mathews & MacLeod, 1985). More recent research has focused more specifically on the various compone...