Abstract
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 direct-gaze 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.
Highlights
Other individuals’ gaze is a powerful social stimulus
Apart from the ventral striatum, the association between reward and the functioning of the other brain areas mentioned above is complicated by the fact that these areas are involved in many other cognitive, affective, and interoceptive functions, and, at the present stage of research, it is difficult to know whether the findings described above are related to affective reactions elicited by gaze or to some other processes like selfreferential processing
The attentional effects and prioritized processing of direct gaze have been central in recent models attempting to describe the various effects of direct gaze and eye contact on cognitive processing (Senju and Johnson, 2009; Conty et al, 2016)
Summary
Other individuals’ gaze is a powerful social stimulus. Perhaps, other individuals’ directed gaze signals their direction of attention. We use others’ gaze to discriminate and infer where they have directed their attention—what or who are they looking at. The most important discrimination is whether other individuals have directed their eyes toward me or away from me. Seeing other individuals’ eyes directed at me indicates, with a high probability, that they are attending to me, whereas seeing other individuals’ averted gaze signals their attention to be directed away from me. Extensive lines of research have shown that others’ gaze direction has effects on an observer’s own attention. Direct gaze has been shown to induce attention orienting toward faces (von Grünau and Anston, 1995; Senju et al, 2005; Conty et al, 2006; Doi et al, 2009; Shirama, 2012; Böckler et al, 2014; Lyyra et al, 2017; for a critical view regarding the results from visual search studies, see Cooper et al, 2013), whereas seeing another individual with a gaze directed away from oneself triggers the re-orienting of one’s visuospatial attention in the gazed-at direction (e.g., Friesen and Kingstone, 1998; Driver et al, 1999; Hietanen, 1999; Langton and Bruce, 1999; for a review, see Frischen et al, 2007)
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