Here's A Simple Trick For Anyone Who Finds Eye Contact Too Intense

Posted on March 22, 2019

Photo: pexels

From an early age, we’re taught that it is well mannered and having self-confident to look people in the eyes when we’re talking to them. Research had shown that people who make adequate amount of eye contact are perceived as more competent, trustworthy and intelligent. Also, meeting the gaze of the person you’re talking to can create a good impression. However, it might not be a straight-forward task for everyone as mutual gaze can be emotionally intense and distracting, even uncomfortably so for some.
A recent study documents a phenomenon known as the “eye contact illusion”, which illustrate that we are not good at telling whether an interlocutor is looking us in the eye or not. With this illusion, you can give the impression of making eye contact simply by ensuring you are looking in the general direction of the person’s face you’re having a conversation with.
One member of Edith Cowan University research team demonstrated the eye contact illusion by holding 4-minute “getting to know you” chats with 46 male and female university students. The students who the researcher chatted to, wore eye tracking glasses. For half of the students, the researcher made plenty of eye contact (around 77% of the time, resulting in mutual eye contact during 52% of the chat) just as he usually would. For the other half, he chatted in the same casual way, but decrease his eye contact to around 25%, focusing more on the mouth region of their faces instead (resulting in mutual eye contact for just 3% of the chat).
The purpose of these test was to determine how much the students in the two groups believed the researcher had tried to make eye contact and how much they enjoyed the chat. The results showed that both groups of students perceived the same amount of eye contact and enjoyed the chat the same amount. A follow-up experiment confirmed that the eye-tracking glasses has no effect on making it hard to judge gaze direction.
The researcher said that their findings were consistent with past evidence suggesting that during normal conversation, the perception of eye contact is driven by the other person looking in the general direction of your face, not into your eyes specifically. This new finding may be reassuring to anyone who wants to be a good communicator but is uncomfortable with making eye contact.

Category(s):Social Anxiety / Phobia

Source material from BPS Digest

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