Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

People use their eyes during social interaction in three primary ways: looking in the direction of the other person's face, often referred to as gaze ; looking away from their partner's face or gaze aversion ; and mutual gaze , in which both interactants look in the direction of the other's face and eye area at the same time. Human beings engage in relatively little direct eye-to-eye contact. For humans and other animal species, eye behavior plays an important role in survival, reproduction, and building/maintaining social and role relationships. Being watched is as important as watching others. As the target of another's eye gaze, a person's performance is infused with significance – in either positive or negative ways. Because of its importance to human interaction, people are sensitive to the absence of gaze when it is expected and its presence when it is not. We often perceive eye-to-eye contact when the eyes are actually tracking many points around the area of the eyes. The direction, frequency, and duration of eye gaze serve several individual and communicative functions in human transactions. Gaze can serve more than one function at a time. One function of gaze is to serve as a mechanism for regulating the flow of interaction . To initiate interaction, people often look into the eye and face area of another person to signal an open channel for communicating. When strangers ... log in or subscribe to read full text