Nonverbal- Q2 eye gaze

• Maintaining eye contact can indicate trust, respect, interest, or attraction towards another person.
• Avoiding eye contact may suggest discomfort, dishonesty, or lack of confidence.
• Eye gaze


  Can be used to communicate a number of things to another person, enables both people to focus on the conversation and read facial expressions
• Interpersonal benefits of eye gaze

  • Helps to bond with one another, certain neurons within the brain that are highly sensitive to facial expressions and eye contacts, can be a tool for intimacy, empathy and linking to one's emotional states, creates bonds between humans
• Intrapersonal benefits of eye gaze

  • Some people like the sound of their own voice, laughter and crying which can elicit internal reactions, helps individuals become more aware of their thoughts, feelings and behaviour, enables them to understand their strengths and weaknesses essential for personal growth and development
• Communicate in face to face has much more averse social demand when speaking over video as there's less demand to maintain eye contact and people's eye gaze behaviour changes considerably online when in comparison to you face to face
• This could be due to the environment or the intimacy of being face to face with another person


  As humans we try and absorb as much information as we can to learn from another such as facial expressions, tone, eye contact which will help us understand how another person is feeling then result in us having a more empathetic and well-rounded response as we use both their nonverbal information and ours to create better communication
• Functions of eye gaze

  • Not only for the benefit of the person who you are communicating to but for the thinking side, people tend to look up when they're trying to remember something or perform another cognitive task, Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) suggests that looking up engages the area of the brain required to process that information, other theories suggest removing stimulus from the environment helps us focus our thinking which then leads to quicker results
• Cognitive load hypothesis (Glenberg, 2007)


  Allows us to focus our cognitive resources on a task that would otherwise be spent processing information in the environment
• Modality-specific interference hypothesis (Wagstaff et al, 2004)


  Allows us to have blank visual slate that we can use to visualise information more clearly, if cognitive load is supported eye closure will improve memory for both visual and auditory information, if modality specific interference is supported, eye closure will only improve visual information
• In a conversation we spend a lot of time focusing on a listener's face to comprehend detailed linguistic phonetic information from the mouth, signal interest and engagement, and is a biologically inherent focal point
• Manipulating eye gaze


  • Lots of information comes from people's nonverbal behaviour such as postures and gestures without looking at them directly, we can manipulate whether someone fixates a gesture, through deictic expressions, when a gesture is suspended in mid air, performing a gesture outside central space, speaker-fixated gesture
• Communicating with someone face to face places a very different social demand when speaking over video, less demand to maintain eye contact, people's eye gaze behaviour changes considerably
• People tend to look up when trying to remember something, or perform another cognitive task
• NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming)


  Suggests that looking up 'engages' the area of the brain required to process that information
• Other theories


  Suggest that we look up to remove stimulus from the environment and focus our thinking
• Modality-specific interference hypothesis (Wagstaff et al, 2004)


  Allows us to have blank visual slate that we can use to visualise information more clearly
• If cognitive load is supported, eye closure will improve memory for both visual and auditory information, if modality specific interference is supported, eye closure will only improve visual information
• Vredeveldt, Hitch & Baddeley (2011) compared the performance of participants on visual and audio memory tasks with their eyes closed, blank screen (control), visual distraction, audio distraction
• If all that is needed to complete a verbal task is to see nothing, there should be no difference between eye closure and blank screen conditions, however if effects were observed between eye closure and blank screen, eye closure has additional benefits for cognitive load
• People may remember more information that is accurate, but that is inconsistent in child interviews as eye closure does not have the same effect
• Simon-Thomas et al 2009 study on vocal bursts showed that the vocal bursts of negative and positive emotions had no difference in accuracy related to the sex of the poses or the judges, and that some vocal bursts are expressed more uniformly across poses, reflecting the extent to which vocal bursts for different emotions are closer to the more universal automatic affect bursts for amusement, anger, sadness, interest
• Vredeveldt et al 2010 study was designed to investigate whether meaningless sensory distraction interferes with memory retrieval and whether it does so in a general or modality-specific manner
• Overall, participants gave significantly more fine grain than coarse grain correct answers in the interview condition with their eyes closed and visual distractions and auditory distractions, the effect of the interview condition was observed for fine grained but correct responses but not for coarse grain correct responses
• Both analyses revealed a significant main effect of question modality, the observed effects were in the opposite directions for each type of recall
• The findings suggest that any type of sensory distraction impaired fine grain correct recall and increased false memories about events compared with interview conditions with minimal distractions, and that visual distraction impaired recall of visual details more than the recall of auditory details, and that auditory distractions were particularly disruptive for recall of auditory details
• Eye movements during conversation are influenced by factors such as the speaker's gender, age, culture, and relationship with the listener.
• People also adjust their eye movements based on the perceived social status of others, making more eye contact with those who have higher status.