Eye Contact

Eye contact occurs when two people look at each other's eyes at the same time. In human beings, eye contact is a form of nonverbal communication and is thought to have a large influence on social behavior. Coined in the early to mid-1960s, the term came from the West to often define the act as a meaningful and important sign of confidence, respect, and social communication. The customs and significance of eye contact vary between societies, with religious and social differences often altering its meaning greatly.

The study of eye contact is sometimes known as oculesics.

Eye contact and facial expressions provide important social and emotional information. People, perhaps without consciously doing so, search other's eyes and faces for positive or negative mood signs. In some contexts, the meeting of eyes arouses strong emotions.

Eye contact is also an important element in flirting, where it may serve to establish and gauge the other's interest in some situations.

Mutual eye contact that signals attraction initially begins as a brief glance and progresses into a repeated volleying of eye contact.

In the process of civil inattention, strangers in close proximity, such as a crowd, avoid eye contact in order to help maintain their privacy.

When two or more individuals talk, the person that talks is used to being looked at. Therefore, making eye contact can make other people expect conversation. Discussing eye contact is actually quite difficult because any attempt to categorize the degree (of sustained contact or measure of directness) and the nature of the eye contact is nearly guaranteed to contain a lot of descriptors derived from one's own cultural predisposition.

A 1985 study suggested that "3-month-old infants are comparatively insensitive to being the object of another's visual regard". A 1996 Canadian study with 3 to 6 month old infants found that smiling in infants decreased when adult eye contact was removed. A recent British study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience found that face recognition by infants was facilitated by direct gaze. Other recent research has confirmed that the direct gaze of adults influences the direct gaze of infants. Within their first year, Infants learn rapidly that the looking behaviors of others conveys significant information. Infants prefer to look at faces that engage them in mutual gaze and that, from an early age, healthy babies show enhanced neural processing of direct gaze.

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