For example, we are more likely to remember faces with which we’ve experienced mutual gaze, and we consider displays of anger and joy to be more intense when shown by a person making eye contact. Whether or not other people make eye contact with us changes the way that we think about them and their feelings. Developmental psychologists have shown that children can benefit from being trained to avert their gaze to help them think things through more clearly. Unlike adults, who mostly know instinctively to break eye contact to help concentrate on what they’re saying, children will tend to maintain gaze even when asked a difficult question. Making eye contact impaired the participants’ performance on the hardest version of the verb generation task, presumably because it consumed spare brain power that might otherwise have been available to support performance on the verbal task. This year a pair of Japanese researchers tested participants on a verb generation task while at the same time they looked at a realistic on-screen face that was either making eye contact with them or had its gaze averted.
In fact, eye contact is such an intense experience it even seems to consume extra brain power, making it difficult to perform other challenging mental tasks at the same time. “Our results support the view that human adults’ bodily awareness becomes more acute when they are subjected to another’s gaze,” the researchers said. Participants had more insight into their own emotional reactions (which were measured objectively through the galvanic skin response) after they’d made eye contact with a face. Researchers showed this by asking participants to rate their own emotional reactions to various positive and negative images, some of which were preceded by a face staring straight at them, others by a face with gaze averted. In fact, children will often claim to be hidden even if they simply avert their gaze while another person looks at them.Ĭhildren with autism often show a noticeable lack of eye contact and part of the reason is their difficulty understanding the social significance of another person’s gaze, and that they find it difficult to infer other people’s mental state from their eyes.Īs adults, locking eyes with another person immediately triggers in us a state of increased self-consciousness. At the age of three and four, for instance, they often believe that so long as they cover their eyes – thus preventing eye contact – that they will be completely hidden from view. Most children recognise the social significance of eye contact, but they seem to take it too far. Similarly, recordings of the brain activity of four-month-olds show that they process gazing faces more deeply than faces that are looking away and at 7-months, infants’ brains process eye contact differently from averted gaze even when the eyes are shown for just 50ms – far too quick for any kind of conscious awareness.
Infants of just two days of age prefer looking at faces that gaze back at them. Our sensitivity to eye contact begins incredibly early. Here we digest the fascinating psychology of eye contact, from tiny babies’ sensitivity to gaze to the hallucination-inducing effects of prolonged eye-staring. Psychologists have made some surprising discoveries about the way that mutual gaze, or the lack of it, affects us mentally and physically and how we relate to each other. Pause for a second and consider the intensity of the situation, the near-magical state of two brains simultaneously processing one another, each aware of being, at that very instant, the centre of the other’s mental world. Many of our relationships begin with that moment when our eyes meet and we realise the other person is looking right at us.