Psychologists have identified the length of eye contact that people find most comfortable

It's a dilemma extremely familiar to anyone with social anxiety – for how long to make eye contact before looking away? The fear is that if you only ever fix the other person's gaze for very brief spells then you'll look shifty. If you lock on for too long, on the other hand, then there's the risk of seeming creepy. Thankfully a team of British researchers has now conducted the most comprehensive study of what people generally regard as a comfortable length of eye contact.For the research published in Royal Society Open Science, Nicola Binetti and her colleagues recruited nearly 500 visitors to the London Science Museum from 56 nations – 224 of them were male and their ages ranged from 11 to 79 years, with an average age of 30.The participants' main task was to sit close to a monitor and watch a series of video clips of the same actor or actress making eye contact with them for various durations between 100ms (a tenth of a second) and 10,300ms (just over ten seconds). The particpiants' pupil dilation was recorded while they watched the brief clips, and after each clip they had to say whether the length of eye contact felt too long or too short for comfort. Each participant watched 40 clips of the same actor or actress, but there were 8 actors and actresses used in the study, all of them Caucasian. The participants also filled out a personality questionnaire and they rated the actor or actress who'd appeared in their clips for various characteristics including attractivene...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Source Type: blogs