Then the subjects indicated their comfort level while watching video clips of actors who appeared to be looking directly at them for varying lengths of time. Johnston and his colleagues found that, on average, the subjects liked the actors to make eye contact with them for 3.
This idea could help explain findings from a controversial study published in , which reported that people are more likely to change their views on a political issue when they are being challenged by people who do not make eye contact with them.
If the challengers had made eye contact, they might have seemed more threatening and less trustworthy. Our reaction to prolonged eye contact may relate to how we perceive ourselves, too. Johnston and his colleagues found that the more cooperative and warm subjects believed themselves to be, the longer they liked eye contact to be held. Credit: Nick Higgins.
Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. On average, participants were most comfortable with eye contact that lasted just over three seconds.
The fear is that if you only ever fix the other person's gaze for very brief spells then you'll look shifty. If you lock on for too long, on the other hand, then there's the risk of seeming creepy. Thankfully a team of British researchers has now conducted the most comprehensive study of what people generally regard as a comfortable length of eye contact. For the research published in Royal Society Open Science , Nicola Binetti and her colleagues recruited nearly visitors to the London Science Museum from 56 nations — of them were male and their ages ranged from 11 to 79 years, with an average age of The participants' main task was to sit close to a monitor and watch a series of video clips of the same actor or actress making eye contact with them for various durations between ms a tenth of a second and 10,ms just over ten seconds.
The participants' pupil dilation was recorded while they watched the brief clips, and after each clip they had to say whether the length of eye contact felt too long or too short for comfort. Each participant watched 40 clips of the same actor or actress, but there were 8 actors and actresses used in the study, all of them Caucasian.
The participants also filled out a personality questionnaire and they rated the actor or actress who'd appeared in their clips for various characteristics including attractiveness and threat. On average, the participants were most comfortable with eye contact that lasted just over three seconds. Looking at the distribution of preferences, the vast majority of participants preferred a duration between two and five seconds.
No-one preferred eye contact durations of less than a second or longer than nine seconds. Surprisingly, there were no links between the participants' personality profiles and their preferences for length of eye contact. There were also no major effects of participant age or gender — the only exception being that among male participants looking at clips featuring an actress, the older the man, the more likely he was to prefer longer eye contact.
Likewise, each time a youth talks to a judge, reads minutes of a meeting out loud or provides a how-to demonstration, that youth is presenting. Presentation skills, like eye contact, can be tricky. Because such skills can be tricky, we will explore some common mistakes in eye contact communication and how to remedy those mistakes.
The Conversation Aid website is a great tool that explores many facets of communication. One of the greatest mistakes in eye contact is staring. They suggest the following tips to help maintain good eye contact without staring:. This article is the third and last in a series of articles that examined eye contact in communication. Remember that eye contact is a skill and it often takes time and practice to fine-tune our skills. This article was published by Michigan State University Extension.
This helps to display interest and confidence. Maintain it for seconds. Once you establish eye contact, maintain or hold it for seconds. After this time passes, you can slowly glance to the side and then go back to establishing eye contact.
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