2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Researchers at University College London have found that average eye contact between non-romantic people lasts only a short time before people feel uncomfortable. The work was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
In their work, the researchers considered eye contact as a means of communication between people. They studied the so-called preferred gaze length - the amount of time a person can look into the eyes of another person without feeling embarrassed or uncomfortable.
The psychologists' experiment was attended by about 500 volunteers who were visitors to the London Science Museum. First, they filled out a short five-factor personality questionnaire that determines a person's temperament and character. The study participants were then asked to sit on a chair with a chin rest (to prevent head movement) and watch a video that was shown on a screen in front of them.
Different videos showed actors (4 women and 4 men), who looked into the eyes of visitors, with each look differing in duration. Volunteers were asked to press the red button next to them when they felt uncomfortable. While the participants in the study looked at the actors, their faces were filmed by a video camera, and their eye movements (including pupil dilation) were tracked using a special sensor.
On the left is the design of the experiment, on the right is a graph with the average comfortable gaze duration.
After analyzing the video and data, the researchers found that the average preferred gaze length did not exceed only 3.3 seconds, although there were some deviations. Moreover, scientists did not find significant differences for men and women (p <0.23)
In addition, they also noticed that there was a connection between the psychological agitation, which the scientists interpreted as dilated pupils, and the duration of eye contact (p = 0.002). So, those volunteers who had dilated pupils looked at the actor in the video longer. Moreover, among them there were people for whom the preferred duration of the gaze was higher, and in such cases the dilation of the pupils was observed earlier than those who did not want longer eye contact.
Thus, the scientists concluded that dilated pupils may be an indicator of the desire for prolonged eye contact. However, on the other hand, they note that this effect may be associated with an increase in the complexity of the "task" - the more people look at the video, the more their pupils dilate.
