No abstract

The present study investigated whether another individual's gaze direction influences an observer's affective responses. In Experiment 1, subjective self-ratings and an affective priming paradigm were employed to examine how participants explicitly and implicitly, respectively, evaluated the affective valence of direct gaze, averted gaze, and closed eyes. The explicit self-ratings showed that participants evaluated closed eyes more positively than direct gaze. However, the implicit priming task showed an inverse pattern of results indicating that direct gaze was automatically evaluated more positively than closed eyes were. Experiment 2 confirmed that the opposite patterns of results between the two tasks were not due to differences in presentation times of the gaze stimuli. The results provide evidence for automatic affective reactions to eye gaze and indicate a dissociation between explicit and implicit affective evaluations of eyes and gaze direction.

We investigated performance in a visuospatial discrimination task and selective attention task (Stroop task) while a live person's direct or averted gaze was presented as a task-irrelevant contextual stimulus. Based on previous research, we expected that response times to peripherally presented targets (Experiment 1) and to the Stroop stimuli (Experiment 2) would be longer in the context of direct versus averted gaze. Contrary to our expectations, the direct gaze context resulted in faster discrimination of visual targets and faster performance in the Stroop task compared with the averted gaze context. We propose that the observed results are explained by enhanced arousal elicited by genuine eye contact. (PsycINFO Database Record

Facial electromyographic responses and skin conductance responses were measured to investigate whether, in a neutral laboratory environment, another individual's direct gaze elicits a positive or negative affective reaction in the observer. The results showed that greater zygomatic responses associated with positive affect were elicited by seeing another person with direct as compared to averted gaze. The zygomatic responses were greater in response to another person's direct gaze both when the participant's own gaze was directed towards the other and when the participant was not looking directly towards the other. Compatible with the zygomatic responses, the corrugator activity (associated with negative affect) was decreased below baseline more in response to another person's direct than averted gaze. Replicating previous research, the skin conductance responses were greater to another person's direct than averted gaze. The results provide evidence that, in a neutral context, another individual's direct gaze is an affiliative, positive signal.

Previous studies have shown that cognitive performance can be affected by the presence of an observer and self-directed gaze. We investigated whether the effect of gaze direction (direct vs. downcast) on verbal memory is mediated by autonomic arousal. Male participants responded with enhanced affective arousal to both male and female storytellers' direct gaze which, according to a path analysis, was negatively associated with the performance. On the other hand, parallel to this arousal-mediated effect, males' performance was affected by another process impacting the performance positively and suggested to be related to effort allocation on the task. The effect of this process was observed only when the storyteller was a male. The participants remembered more details from a story told by a male with a direct vs. downcast gaze. The effect of gaze direction on performance was the opposite for female storytellers, which was explained by the arousal-mediated process. Surprisingly, these results were restricted to male participants only and no effects of gaze were observed among female participants. We also investigated whether the participants' belief of being seen or not (through an electronic window) by the storyteller influenced the memory and arousal, but this manipulation had no effect on the results.