Just a moment...
doi.org

Abstract of the paper: Despite the dramatic rise of surveillance in our societies, only limited research has examined its effects on humans. While most research has focused on voluntary behaviour, no study has examined the effects of surveillance on more fundamental and automatic aspects of human perceptual awareness and cognition. Here, we show that being watched on CCTV markedly impacts a hardwired and involuntary function of human sensory perception—the ability to consciously detect faces. Using the method of continuous flash suppression (CFS), we show that when people are surveilled (N = 24), they are quicker than controls (N = 30) to detect faces. An independent control experiment (N = 42) ruled out an explanation based on demand characteristics and social desirability biases. These findings show that being watched impacts not only consciously controlled behaviours but also unconscious, involuntary visual processing. Our results have implications concerning the impacts of surveillance on basic human cognition as well as public mental health.

My own commentary: to the privacy concerns about CCTVs we can now add also concerns about mental health of people under CCTVs.

  • SemOPEnglish
    8·
    7 hours ago

    As I understood, the main concern is that such a hyper fast eye gaze is similar to the psychosis and social anxiety disorder where individuals hold irrational beliefs or preoccupations with the idea of being watched.

    Our finding that sensory processing of gaze direction is facilitated by the act of being watched is consistent with evidence suggesting top-down cognition can influence the earliest stages of gaze processing (Teufel et al. 2009). Also, eye-tracking studies indicate that a social presence can significantly alter where attention is allocated (Risko and Kingstone 2011, Nasiopoulos et al. 2015). In light of our findings, an enhanced and specific allocation of attentional resources towards self-relevant social information seems plausible. Importantly, our results rule out that being watched leads to a non-specific attentional boost, as non-face stimuli did not benefit from this effect; instead, our results support the idea that this is a specific effect directed towards face information. This is consistent with clinical observations of social-specific attentional biases and a hyper-sensitivity to eye gaze in mental health conditions like psychosis and social anxiety disorder where individuals hold irrational beliefs or preoccupations with the idea of being watched (Rosse et al. 1994, Hooker and Park 2005, Corlett et al. 2009, Tso et al. 2012, Langer and Rodebaugh 2013, Chen et al. 2017, Langdon et al. 2017, Stuke et al. 2021). Future investigations should explore in detail the effects of surveillance and the sense of privacy on public mental health, as these can have profound social implications (Aboujaoude 2019).