The Importance of Eye Contact in Healthy Humans

The term given to define two people gazing at each other’s eyes is eye contact (Harper, Wiens & Matarazzo, 1978). Eye contact is considered an effective form of nonverbal communication, which is utilised to convey expression and information with others. For instance, during social interactions, it is possible to gage the other person’s reaction through eye contact. It is therefore a useful social tool, which can be deliberately utilised in order to perform the following actions; provide non-verbal information, regulate interaction, express intimacy, exercise social control, and facilitate task goals with another individual (Petterson, 1982, 1983). It is possible to split the category of eye contact into two sub categories; eye contact duration and patterns of eye contact (Kleinke, 1986). People with neurodevelopmental disorders, such as Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), often engage in significantly less eye contact than neuro-typical people (Dalton, Nacewicz, Johnstone, Schaefer, Gernsbacher & Goldsmith, 2005), therefore it may be possible to conclude that people with ASD are missing crucial social information.

Autism was first identified by Kramer in the early 1940’s and was considered to consist of atypical behaviours and problems with communication. Later in the 1940’s Asperger identified a similar but less severe disorder that he named Asperger’s Syndrome. The overlap between these two disorders has become more prevalent in recent years and has resulted in them recently being given a collective term of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ASD is defined as a neurodevelopmental disorder which consists of impairments in an individual’s communication, social and/or behavioural abilities (Wing, 1981). These three ...

... middle of paper ...

... This study will also be matching participants on gender as ASD is more common in boys. The results of this study are important because current social interventions for individuals with ASD focus on increasing the amount of eye contact they make to a ‘typical’ amount, if individuals with ASD are able to communicate and recognise emotions without making eye contact, then this raises the following question – are the social interventions benefitting the individual with ASD or those around them?

Current theories and previous research have led to the formation of the following hypothesis; participants with ASD will show less eye contact while listening, a similar pattern of eye contact while thinking and less eye contact while speaking than people without ASD. A further hypothesis is that all participants will avoid eye contact more as question difficulty increases.