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
Exam Tip
Regulating the flow of conversation is a social behaviour which is learned via a person’s upbringing and culture. A good AO3 discussion point would be to highlight the fact that cultural misunderstandings can happen when people converse with others from different cultures e.g. in some cultures interrupting the speaker may be normal behaviour whereas in other cultures it would be viewed as being rude.
- 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
Worked example
Here is an example of a question you might be asked on this topic - for AO1 and AO2.
AO1: You need to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of key concepts, ideas, theories and research.
AO2: You need to apply your knowledge and understanding, usually referring to the ‘stem’ in order to do so (the stem is the example given before the question)
AO3: You need to analyse and evaluate key concepts, ideas, theories and research.
After each featured question there is a ‘model’ answer i.e. one which would achieve top marks in the exam.
Bart is playing computer games in his bedroom. His sister Lisa comes into his room and starts talking to him about what present they should get for their mum’s birthday. Bart doesn’t look up from his computer game, replying to Lisa without looking at her. Lisa gets annoyed with Bart and ends up storming out of his room.
Question: Identify two functions of eye contact that could have been affected by Bart playing computer games. Use the conversation between Bart and Lisa to explain at least one of the functions of eye contact that you have identified. [4 marks]
AO1 = 2 marks
AO2 = 2 marks
Model answer:
AO1: (One mark for any of the following functions):
- Regulating the flow of conversation.
- Expressing emotion
- Signalling attraction
(You could also get a mark for answering that it shows that you are paying attention to what someone is saying)
NOTE: To get a mark, the identified functions do not need to be specifically seen to be affected in the conversation i.e. in this case ‘signalling attraction’ is not relevant to Bart and Lisa but it is still relevant to the topic of eye contact.
AO2:
- Bart does not take his eyes off his computer game which means that he would not be able to attend to the conversation and thus the flow of it would be broken e.g. he won’t be able to judge when Lisa is giving him his ‘turn’ to speak.
- Bart does not look at Lisa - he does not give her direct eye contact - which makes Lisa angry as she may feel that he is not respecting her by ignoring the eye contact she is giving him.
