News Release
September 23, 2002
For Immediate Release
Contact: Brian Weaver
(202) 783.2077 ext. 3022
bweaver@psychologicalscience.org
Are You Looking at Me?
Eye Gaze and Perception of Others
Some say first impressions are everything. Those initial impressions shape our attitudes and opinions of others. New research suggests that the level of eye contact affects the efficiency of our brain at accessing and categorizing people according to our own preexisting criteria.
Direct eye contact between people facilitates important social-cognitive effects, improving the speed with which we can categorize people as men or women and categorize them based on our individual stereotypes, according to a study published in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society. Authors of the study are researchers C. Neil Macrae, Dartmouth College; Bruce M. Hood, University of Bristol, England; Alan B. Milne, University of Aberdeen, Scotland; Angela C. Rowe, University of Bristol, England; and Malia F. Mason, Dartmouth College.
"By emphasizing the functional nature of categorical thinking, researchers have unraveled some of the more perplexing mysteries of the person-perception process," the authors wrote. "As economizing mental devices, categorical knowledge structures confer order, meaning, and predictability to an otherwise chaotic social world."
The investigators conducted experiments to test how eye gaze affects person categorization and knowledge accessibility. Participants were asked to judge the gender of persons in a series of 48 photographs in varying degrees of direct eye contact with the participant. The dependent variable measured in the experiment was the time it took participants to categorize the gender of the person in the photograph. The results confirmed the authors' theory of "the importance and informational value of mutual eye contact." Gender-categorization times were fastest when targets were looking straight ahead.
The complete article and others from the journal Psychological Science are available at www.psychologicalscience.org/media. For more information, contact Macrae at c.n.macrae@dartmouth.edu.
Psychological Science was ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact on the field by the Institute for Scientific Information. The American Psychological Society's mission focuses on the advancement of research and science-based psychology in the public's interest.