Eye contact and intimacy
Abstract
The meeting of the eyes is a potent form of communication. The eyes are able to convey
many subtle nuances of feeling by their complex capacity for expression. Their stimulus
configuration has made them highly noticeable; they serve as an innate releaser for
the responses of animals and infants. The fact that they are critical in the maternal
- infant relationship later gives them special meaning to the adult person. This is
conveyed in the many references to the eyes found in literature, language, art, and
mythology. Psychologists have begun to recognize, both in research and practice,
the importance of eye contact in interpersonal interaction. Eyes intensify expressions
of warmth and empathy, as well as hostility and aggression (Ellsworth & Carlsmith,
1968). Recognizing this, psycho- therapists have begun to emphasize the intimacy value
of eye contact. Group therapists and sensitivity trainers often ask strangers to engage
in eye contact as a way of transcending interpersonal barriers in a group. Many of
the relationships between eye contact and variables such as sex, age, race, and culture
have been investigated. It is assumed in most of these studies that eye contact leads
to intimacy. The present study will attempt to document this assumption. For this
purpose, it was hypothesized that 3 minutes of silent eye contact between a female
subject and a confederate would facilitate inti- macy more so than the two selected
silent control conditions which were also of 3 -minute duration. One of these involved
looking at another part of the body, the hand, and the other was an interaction in
which no instructions were given other than to maintain silence. For this study, intimacy
was postulated to be composed of the Rogerian attitudes which facilitate therapeutic
change - empathy, positive regard, and congruence. In addition to the main effect
of condition, a secondary prediction involved a main effect of personality. That is,
the way a subject responded to the confederate was partly related to the subject's
style of relating to people, regardless of experimental condition. A three-way interaction
effect was predicted for the dependent variable of state anxiety such that high AFFE
would lead to an increase in anxiety going from high interpersonal contact- -the eye
contact condition- -to low interpersonal contact- -the hand and non-directed conditions.
The reverse was predicted for low AFFE. In addition, the magnitude of the interaction
would differ for high vs. low anxious subjects on the trait anxiety. That is, the
amount of anxiety experienced by high and low AFFE subjects in both the high and low
contact conditions was hypothesized to be less. As predicted, in all cases women
who made eye contact expressed more intimacy than the those with no eye contact. By
their own report, they felt more empathy, positive feeling, and willingness to tell
intimate details about their lives to the women they had visually contacted than did
the women in the other situations. Furthermore, the hypothesis was partially confirmed
that subjects who usually express affection to other people (high AFFE) feel greater
empathy than do low AFFE subjects. Only in the case of empathy was the difference
between high and low AFFE significant; however, the trend was in the predicted direction
for self-disclosure and positive feeling variables. The final hypothesis was not supported.
That is, trait anxiety did not interact significantly with condition and personality
for state anxiety. Problems in the measurement of this variable may have accounted
for the nonsignificant results. Implications for further research are discussed.
Description
This thesis was digitized as part of a project begun in 2014 to increase the number
of Duke psychology theses available online. The digitization project was spearheaded
by Ciara Healy.
Type
DissertationDepartment
PsychologyPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/13571Published Version (Please cite this version)
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