Mutual Eye Research Articles

The social psychophysics of cooperation: Nonverbal communication in a public goods game.

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that cooperation in a social dilemma context could be facilitated by inducing participants to emit “social psychophysical” cues, information in the perceptual array that affords meaningful and consequential social inferences. In particular, participants were asked to engage in mutual eye gaze, to touch one another gently, to communicate in a virtual chat room, or to tap out rhythms in synchrony. All but the last of these manipulations increased contributions to a public good in all-male but not all-female groups. These results suggest the inference systems that are engaged when individuals make decisions about whether or not to cooperate in a group context are responsive to relatively low level nonverbal behavioral cues.

Gender Differences in Emotional Closeness Between Preschool Children and Their Mothers

The emotional closeness between mothers andtheir children was examined to determine if motherdaughter pairs exhibit closer emotional relationshipsthan mother son pairs. Forty-one mother childpredominantly Caucasian dyads were videotaped during asemistructured play setting. The children were 4 (10males and 10 females) and 5 years of age (10 males and11 females). Emotional closeness was defined as physical proximity, mutual eye contact, and global levelof enjoyment. Results demonstrated that compared toboys, girls were physically closer to their mothers,engaged in more mutual eye contact with their mothers, and were rated higher on global enjoyment.Results are consistent with Chodorow's theory thatgender identity development is related to the emotionalrelationships that develop between children and their mothers.

Gaze in Cooperative and Competitive Games

Amount of mutual eye contact, the time spent on gazing at each other, and speech were compared between fifteen cooperative and competitive pairs during performance of a computer bowling game. The cooperative pairs tended to look at their partners more often than did the competitive pairs. The prediction that the cooperative pairs would spend more time gazing at one another than the competitive pairs in this task situation was not supported. The frequency of individual gaze and mutual eye contact did not occur at equally high levels in competition compared with cooperation. The cooperative pairs spoke more than the competitive pairs.

Interpersonal Ratings and Mutual Eye Contact

This study explores associations of mutual eye contact (MEC) with self-accepting and other- accepting conduct by small group members as assessed by pooled group peers and self. Peer- based estimates of individuals' MEC consistently correlated positively and significantly with peers'ratings of their self-accepting behavior, with the spans individuals used for these in terpersonal ratings, and more mildly but consistently with their severity as raters, but not with self-ratings of self-acceptance or other-acceptance or with peer-rated acceptance of others. The results indicate robust and substantial connections between interpersonal behav iors representing the nonverbal and verbal domains despite rather limited reliability of these MEC measures.

Contrasting Interpersonal Correlates of Mutual Eye-Contact Reports by Self and others

Four small interpersonal groups' 32 participants estimated each pair's mutual eye contact (MEC) in seconds for 90-min. sessions culminating Hours 6, 22 1/2, 28 1/2, and 45. Individuals also inclusively rated each person's within-group behavior for acceptance of self and of others near Hours 22 and 44. Aggregated to augment reliability, peers' mean estimates of each individual's mutual eye contact showed greater interoccasion consistency and correlated more strongly with each acceptance index than did MEC self-reports. Substantial positive correlations (.47 to .55) between peer-rated self-acceptance and peer-based eye contact consistently exceeded other-acceptance's parallel linkages. In contrast, self-based estimates of mutual eye-contact correlated more positively with acceptance of others than with self-acceptance in all eight separate instances.

Mutual Eye Contact as Affected by Seating Position, Sex, and Age

Summary The effect upon mutual eye contact of two seating positions (opposite and beside), sex of pairs (male-male, female-female, and male-female), and three divisions of adult age (young, middle, and senior) was examined by observing 216 pairs of white adults who frequented four shopping centers in the metropolitan area of a Midwestern American city. The results showed that pairs seated opposite each other had significantly more mutual eye contact than pairs seated adjacent to each other. Young and senior adults engaged in significantly more mutual eye contact than did middle-age adults. Significant interactions were obtained for sex of pairs and age, and for seating position, sex, and age.