Eye Contact (AQA GCSE Psychology)

Eye contact & communication

• Eye contact is a form of non-verbal communication (NVC) which involves how the eyes can communicate a range of meanings. For example:

  • Direction of gaze

  • Duration of gaze

  • The lowering or raising of the eyelids and/or eyebrows

• Eye contact occurs when two people are looking at each other’s eyes at the same time

• It has several functions and purposes, one of which is regulating the flow of conversation:

  • Humans learn to pick up non-verbal cues around eye contact from the multiple conversations they have during their lifetime

  • A non-verbal cue linked to eye contact can be seen when someone wishes to take their turn in the conversation: they look away from the other person and when they are about to finish what they are saying they look at the person to whom they are speaking (Kendon, 1967)

  • Vertegaal et al. (2001) conducted research using an eye tracker during a four-person conversation:

    • They found that when someone is listening or speaking to individuals there is a high probability that the person looked at is the person listened to or spoken to, therefore, the gaze is a good predictor of conversational attention in groups

• Another function of eye contact is to signal attraction:

  • One way to tell someone - non-verbally - that you are attracted to them is to maintain eye contact with them (which may be where that old cliche ‘love at first sight’ comes from)

  • Finding someone attractive (physically and/or psychologically) means that you are likely to want to look at them for long periods of time:

    • Some evolutionary psychologists believe that this is an inbuilt mechanism to aid human survival across the millennia as it builds familiarity with each other which strengthens bonding between a couple

  • Conway et al. (2007) found that participants preferred images of people who were looking straight at them, particularly when the person in the image was of the opposite sex, hence a direct gaze is linked to higher levels of attraction than an averted gaze (i.e. when the person in the image was looking away to one side)

    • People may prefer a direct gaze as it appeals to their vanity (i.e. how important/special they are made to feel)

    • Lawson (2014) found that participants preferred images of faces looking directly at them, even when the faces looked angry and they showed little interest when the faces were replaced with coloured shapes

Using eye contact may signal attraction

• Another function of eye contact is to express emotion:

  • Eye contact can be a powerful emotional tool, sometimes without someone even realising that their eye contact is being interpreted as hostile/bored/mocking (have you ever had someone say to you, ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ when you didn’t even realise that you were!)

  • A study by Rychlowska et al. (2012) found that participants rated images of people smiling while making eye contact as more emotional than images with no eye contact (this was true even when the image of the smiling person had been manipulated by AI), thus eye contact reinforces the positive emotional message of a smile

  • Adams & Kleck (2005) found that the intensity of emotion was regulated via eye contact

    • Emotions such as joy and anger were found to be more intense when used with direct eye contact

    • Sadness and fear were found to be most intense when used with an averted gaze

    • Thus eye contact can be used to express a range of emotions in different ways

Eye contact can be used to express emotions

Evaluation of eye contact

Strengths

• There are some good applications for the use of eye contact in the real world: in teaching, in business, in advertising, and the police force, which means there is credibility to the idea that eye contact is an important part of interpersonal communication

• Research (some of which is cited above) supports the idea that people prefer a direct gaze overall (unless the message being sent is one of aggression/hostility) which could be a survival mechanism i.e. ‘Look at me, I’ve got nothing to hide!’

Weaknesses

• Using rating scales to measure opinions and feelings is subjective: psychology strives to be objective and unbiased, which makes research in this field unreliable (due to a lack of consistency and scientific method)

• Rating images of people (as in Rychlowska’s study above) is an artificial task as this is not something that people generally do in the course of their daily lives so this lowers the validity of the study