Eye contact as a nonverbal strategy in facilitating patients' verbal participation

Abstract

In medical consultations, through the process of doctor questions and patient responses, doctors aim to elicit a comprehensive understanding of patients' health problems in order to establish an accurate diagnosis. Research has demonstrated that eye contact functions as a strategy in eliciting responses from addressees. This paper further explores whether eye contact encourages addressees' verbal participation in the context of medical interviews. We focus on patient responses to doctors' first open questions (e.g., what's your problem today?) since they are often taken as the patients' chief complaints and raised as the topics for discussion during the rest of the consultation. Our analysis is based on 23 videotaped medical consultations collected from a tertiary teaching hospital in southern Taiwan. The participants are doctors from the Department of Family Medicine and their elderly patients, each accompanied by a family member. In terms of three varying degrees of doctor-patient eye contact durations, this paper aims to discover the eye contact effect on patients' verbal participation. The results show that after doctors' first open questions, patients in the more eye contact group verbally participate more and longer (46.1 syllables in 19.4 seconds) in their responses than the less eye contact group (21.9 syllables in 13.5 seconds) and the no eye contact group (0.3 syllables in 14.7 seconds). Based on these results, this paper suggests that doctors' eye contact with patients encourages patients' narration of their health problems.