Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit a reduced duration of eye contact compared with typically developing (TD) individuals. This reduced eye contact has been theorized to be a strategy to relieve discomfort elicited by direct eye contact (Tanaka & Sung, 2016). Looking at threatening facial expressions may elicit more discomfort and consequently more eye avoidance in ASD individuals than looking at nonthreatening expressions. We explored whether eye avoidance in children with ASD is modulated by the social threat level of emotional expressions. In this study, 2- to 5-year-old children with and without ASD viewed faces with happy, angry, sad, and neutral expressions, while their eye movements were recorded. We observed the following: (a) when confronted with angry faces, the children with ASD fixated less on the eyes than did TD children, persistently across time; (b) the group differences in the overall eye-looking time were rarely found for happy, neutral, and sad faces; (c) the ASD group showed eye avoidance for neutral faces between 1,000 ms and 2,900 ms after the stimulus onset. Additionally, both groups spent more time looking at the angry faces than the faces showing other emotions. Considering that the children with ASD spent less time looking at the eyes of the angry faces than other emotional faces, the results suggest a combination of vigilance to threatening faces and an avoidance of the eyes in children with ASD. Our study not only extends the gaze aversion hypothesis but also has implications for the treatment and screening of ASD.

Objective We investigated the effects of exogenous oxytocin on trust, compliance, and team decision making with agents varying in anthropomorphism (computer, avatar, human) and reliability (100%, 50%). Background Recent work has explored psychological similarities in how we trust human-like automation compared to how we trust other humans. Exogenous administration of oxytocin, a neuropeptide associated with trust among humans, offers a unique opportunity to probe the anthropomorphism continuum of automation to infer when agents are trusted like another human or merely a machine. Method Eighty-four healthy male participants collaborated with automated agents varying in anthropomorphism that provided recommendations in a pattern recognition task. Results Under placebo, participants exhibited less trust and compliance with automated aids as the anthropomorphism of those aids increased. Under oxytocin, participants interacted with aids on the extremes of the anthropomorphism continuum similarly to placebos, but increased their trust, compliance, and performance with the avatar, an agent on the midpoint of the anthropomorphism continuum. Conclusion This study provided the first evidence that administration of exogenous oxytocin affected trust, compliance, and team decision making with automated agents. These effects provide support for the premise that oxytocin increases affinity for social stimuli in automated aids. Application Designing automation to mimic basic human characteristics is sufficient to elicit behavioral trust outcomes that are driven by neurological processes typically observed in human-human interactions. Designers of automated systems should consider the task, the individual, and the level of anthropomorphism to achieve the desired outcome.

No abstract

The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civil and military domains has spurred increasingly complex automation design for augmenting operator abilities, reducing workload, and increasing mission effectiveness. We describe the Adaptive Interface Management System (AIMS), an intelligent adaptive delegation interface for controlling and monitoring multiple unmanned vehicles, with a mixed-initiative team model language. A study was conducted to assess understanding of this model language and whether participants exhibited calibrated trust in the intelligent automation. Results showed that operators had accurate memory for role responsibility and were well calibrated to the automation. Adaptive automation design approaches like the one described in this paper can be useful to create mixedinitiative human-robot teams.

There is a sharp rise in depressive moods from childhood to adolescence. Since moods can cross over from a child to a parent and spill over from family to work, offspring's temporary feelings of depression represent potential risks for parents' occupational health and well-being. In the current study, the authors investigate the impacts of offspring's temporary feelings of depression on mothers' work engagement via the transfer of negative moods, and on fathers' work engagement via the transfer of positive moods. Participants were 265 full-time employees and their adolescent offspring. The results confirmed our hypotheses. Offspring's temporary feelings of depression were associated with less maternal work engagement via increased maternal negative moods and endangered paternal work engagement via decreased paternal positive moods. The finding implies that negative emotions may be related to the occupational health of working mothers, while positive emotions may be related to the occupational health of working fathers. K E Y W O R D S gender difference in the workplace, offspring's temporary feelings of depression, parental work engagement, transfer of moods