Eye contact and arousal: The effects of stimulus duration

Frontiers in Psychology, 2018

In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals' direct gaze has robust effects on various attentional and cognitive processes. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to investigating the affective effects triggered by eye contact. This article reviews research concerning the effects of others' gaze direction on observers' affective responses. The review focuses on studies in which affective reactions have been investigated in well-controlled laboratory experiments, and in which contextual factors possibly influencing perceivers' affects have been controlled. Two important themes emerged from this review. First, explicit affective evaluations of seeing another's direct versus averted gaze have resulted in rather inconsistent findings; some studies report more positive subjective feelings to direct compared to averted gaze, whereas others report the opposite pattern. These contradictory findings may be related, for example, to differences between studies in terms of the capability of directgaze stimuli to elicit feelings of self-involvement. Second, studies relying on various implicit measures have reported more consistent results; they indicate that direct gaze increases affective arousal, and more importantly, that eye contact automatically evokes a positively valenced affective reaction. Based on the review, possible psychological mechanisms for the positive affective reactions elicited by eye contact are described.

Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2018

Recent research has revealed enhanced autonomic and subjective responses to eye contact only when perceiving another live person. However, these enhanced responses to eye contact are abolished if the viewer believes that the other person is not able to see back to the viewer. We purported to investigate whether this "genuine" eye contact effect can be reproduced with prerecorded videos of stimulus persons. Autonomic responses, gaze behavior, and subjective selfassessments were measured while participants viewed pre-recorded video persons with direct or averted gaze, imagined that the video person was real, and mentalized that the person could see them or not. Pre-recorded videos did not evoke similar physiological or subjective eye contact effect as previously observed with live persons, not even when the participants were mentalizing of being seen by the person. Gaze tracking results showed, however, increased attention allocation to faces with direct gaze compared to averted gaze directions. The results suggest that elicitation of the physiological arousal in response to genuine eye contact seems to require spontaneous experience of seeing and of being seen by another individual.

Psychophysiology, 2017

Is another person's direct gaze an inherently positive or negative stimulus? The present study employed the startle reflex methodology to investigate individuals' automatic reactions to another person's direct and averted gaze. In the study, participants' eyeblink startle and cardiac reflexes elicited by a high-intensity acoustic noise stimulus were measured in the context of viewing a live model's direct and downward gaze. Both the eyeblink electromyographic and electrocardiographic data revealed that the startle reflex was modulated by gaze direction. Direct gaze attenuated the eyeblink startle and cardiac reflexes to the acoustic probes compared to those elicited in the context of a downward gaze. These results indicate that the defense reflex is weaker when presented in the context of direct versus downward gaze, and thus suggest that another individual's direct gaze, compared to averted gaze, automatically elicits more positive affective responses in the...

Biological Psychology, 1980

2012

At times perceiving direct gaze causes higher autonomic arousal than perceiving averted gaze. Such different responses-notably found between face-to-face and pictorial gaze-have been suggested to be caused by attributing a live gazer with the ability to see: The direct gaze of a live onlooker may cause people to think that they are seen and heighten autonomic arousal. Being seen has also been linked with changes in self-awareness. We wanted to examine if the thought of being seen paired with a direct gaze would intensify autonomic activation and heighten subjectively reported self-awareness and arousal when compared to averted gaze and not beeing seen. To separate live gazing stimuli from the ability to see we used live-feed of a face on a television screen, and varied the reciprocity of a video link. The participants could see the face of the model in both conditions, but the model was claimed to be able to see them only in the reciprocal condition. Autonomic skin conductivity responses (SCR) and self-report data on arousal, self-awareness and social presence from 18 healthy adult participants were analyzed with robust modern methods. Contrary to expectations, psychophysiological arousal did not accompany the mental-state attribution of gaze as "seeing": Neither the main effect of the reciprocity of the video link nor the main effect of gaze direction nor the interaction between them was statistically significant. Nevertheless self-reported arousal heightened to reciprocal gaze in comparison with nonreciprocal gaze, as subjective ratings of emotional arousal showed a main effect for the presence of the reciprocal link. Gaze direction, however, did not significantly affect self-reported arousal and there was no interaction between gaze direction and reciprocity. Nonetheless the locus of awareness was affected by the mental attribution of gaze as seeing: The reciprocity of the link significantly heightened self-reported public self-awareness and the nonreciprocity of the link significantly heightened self-reported awareness of the environment. Neither gaze direction nor the reciprocity of the video link had an effect on either self-reported valence or felt social presence. According to our results the mental attribution of being seen does not have an effect on arousal, but it makes people focus on themselves and changes the way they perceive their arousal state. Previously reported larger autonomic responses to direct gaze than averted gaze are suggested to capture the affective significance of both physical and social presence and be further affected by adequacy judgments. Effects of stimulus mediation through a video-link are discussed. Further research is called for to confirm the results and to better understand how these factors may modulate autonomic arousal when perceiving gaze.

Social Neuroscience, 2010

Eye contact is a highly salient and fundamentally social signal. This entails that the mere perception of direct gaze may trigger differentiated neurobehavioral responses as compared to other gaze directions. We investigated this issue using a visual word-spelling task where faces under different gaze directions and head orientations were displayed on-screen concomitantly with the words. We show evidence for automatic increase of skin conductance response (SCR), indicative of arousal, associated with the perception of direct gaze as compared to both averted gaze and closed eyes. Moreover, the perception of averted gaze was associated with an increase of electromyographic (EMG) corrugator activity. These effects were observed in two demanding word-spelling tasks, but not in a simple letter decision task. We propose to interpret these findings in terms of the social value of direct and averted gaze and conclude that some circumstances such as the task at hand may be essential for uncovering the neurobehavioral responses associated with the perception of others' gaze.

Cognition, 2014

Eye contact is a typical human behaviour known to impact concurrent or subsequent cognitive processing. In particular, it has been suggested that eye contact induces selfawareness, though this has never been formally proven. Here, we show that the perception of a face with a direct gaze (that establishes eye contact), as compared to either a face with averted gaze or a mere fixation cross, led adult participants to rate more accurately the intensity of their physiological reactions induced by emotional pictures. Our data support the view that bodily self-awareness becomes more acute when one is subjected to another's gaze. Importantly, this effect was not related to a particular arousal state induced by eye contact perception. Rejecting the arousal hypothesis, we suggest that eye contact elicits a self-awareness process by enhancing self-focused attention in humans. We further discuss the implications of this proposal.

Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2012

In our previous studies we have shown that seeing another person "live" with a direct vs. averted gaze results in enhanced skin conductance responses (SCRs) indicating autonomic arousal and in greater relative left-sided frontal activity in the electroencephalography (asymmetry in the alpha-band power), associated with approach motivation. In our studies, however, the stimulus persons had a neutral expression. In real-life social interaction, eye contact is often associated with a smile, which is another signal of the sender's approach-related motivation. A smile could, therefore, enhance the affective-motivational responses to eye contact. In the present study, we investigated whether the facial expression (neutral vs. social smile) would modulate autonomic arousal and frontal EEG alpha-band asymmetry to seeing a direct vs. an averted gaze in faces presented "live" through a liquid crystal (LC) shutter. The results showed that the SCRs were greater for the d...

Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 2009

2019

The eyes reveal important social messages, such as emotions and whether a person is aroused and interested or bored and fatigued. A growing body of research has also shown that individuals with large pupils are generally evaluated positively by observers, while those with small pupils are perceived negatively. Here, we examined whether observed pupil size influences approach-avoidance tendencies. Participants performed an Approach-Avoidance Task using faces with large and small pupil sizes. Results showed that pupil size influences the accuracy of arm movements. Specifically, individuals were less prone to approach a face with small pupils than a face with large pupils. Conversely, participants were less prone to avoid a face with large pupils than a face with small pupils. Collectively, these findings suggest that perceivers attend to a facial cue – pupil size – when interacting with others.