Why Eye Contact Makes Us Uncomfortable – The Curious Case of Stare Rape?
Christopher Philip
Research is shedding light on the power of eye contact and helps explain why we feel so awkward when making eye contact with another person – especially when that eye contact comes as a surprise.
Matias Baltazar and his colleagues have found that eye contact activates people’s awareness of their own bodies. Your brain, he says, is more “attuned to your body” and this is why you can’t feel at ease when someone is peering at you.
The actual study had 32 participants view a series of positive and negative images on a computer screen. Then they had the subjects rate the intensity of their emotional reactions. The images were either of a man or woman whom was either making eye contact or had their eyes averted. While all of this was going on, electrodes measured skin conductivity (to measure perspiration) and thus measure emotional reaction.
When skin conductivity and a person’s conscious emotional reaction were compared, it was found that when eye contact was being made by the photograph, people’s self-assessments were more congruent – they matched up with their sweating measurements.
“Our results support the view that human adults’ bodily awareness becomes more acute when they are subjected to another’s gaze,” the researchers said.
Importantly, there was no arousal difference between the no-eye contact photos and the eye contact photos. This ruled out any side-effects that might have resulted from the images at large.
Baltazar and his team said that the results may help people whose awareness of their bodies is particularly damaging including conditions of interoceptive hyposensitivity such as anorexia nervosa and major depression disorder.
As an aside, one might also wonder if this is at play in so called “stare rape” where some women feel particularly troubled by the gaze of men. Could it be that these women are particularly self-conscious of their bodies, so much so that they feel that any unwanted gaze is a direct assault on them. Certainly, the results of this study seem to support that level of deduction, but more research is necessary.
Regardless, however, as a user of body language, one should heed the data and should one wish to yield positive results in daily life, pay particular attention to the reactions of others even as a results of such seemingly trivial matters as eye gaze.
Resources
Baltazar M; Hazem N; Vilarem E; Beaucousin V; Picq JL, and Conty L. Eye Contact Elicits Bodily Self-Awareness in Human Adults. Cognition. 2019. 133 (1): 120-7 PMID: 25014360