The Look of Love: Gaze Shifts and Person Perception

Gaze direction is a vital communicative channel through which people transmit information to each other. By signaling the locus of social attention, gaze cues convey information about the relative importance of objects, including other people, in the environment. For the most part, this information...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychological science 2005-03, Vol.16 (3), p.236-239
Main Authors: Mason, Malia F., Tatkow, Elizabeth P., Macrae, C. Neil
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Attention
Beauty
Behavior
Cognition
Cues
Experiment design
Eyes
Eyes & eyesight
Facial Expression
Female
Fixation, Ocular
Gaze
Humans
Infants
Interpersonal Relations
Judgment
Likability
Love
Male
Men
Nonverbal Communication
Orientation
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Personal Construct Theory
Psychology
Sensory perception
Set (Psychology)
Social Behavior
Social cognition
Social Desirability
Social interaction
Social perception
Visual fixation
Visual Perception
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Summary:Gaze direction is a vital communicative channel through which people transmit information to each other. By signaling the locus of social attention, gaze cues convey information about the relative importance of objects, including other people, in the environment. For the most part, this information is communicated via patterns of gaze direction, with gaze shifts signaling changes in the objects of attention. Noting the relevance of gaze cues in social cognition, we speculated that gaze shifts may modulate people's evaluations of others. We investigated this possibility by asking participants to judge the likability (Experiment 1) and physical attractiveness (Experiment 2) of targets displaying gaze shifts indicative of attentional engagement or disengagement with the participants. As expected, person evaluation was moderated by the direction of gaze shifts, but only when the judgment under consideration was relevant to participants. We consider how and when gaze shifts may modulate person perception and its associated behavioral products.
ISSN:0956-7976
1467-9280
DOI:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00809.x