Look away to listen: the interplay of emotional context and eye contact in video conversations

Eye gaze is a fundamental element of social interaction. We investigated the role of gaze direction during video conversations between friends, colleagues or strangers. Participants watched short video cuts of a target person engaging in direct gaze, averted gaze or a mixture of both (gaze direction) while listening to another, invisible, person recounting a neutral or negative autobiographical episode (emotional context). Subsequently, participants rated the target person on empathy, perspective taking and trustworthiness and indicated how close they perceived the relationship between conversation partners. We found that participants rated the target person and the interaction less favourable when the target’s gaze was averted. Critically, these effects of gaze direction were modulated by emotional context: When narrations were negative, (partly) averted gaze had a less negative impact on participants evaluations. Hence, gaze direction is not perceived and interpreted in isolation, but in context