The Eyes Don’t Have It
“Doesn’t make eye contact”: It’s often noted that autistic individuals don’t do this. Science Daily reports on new research that it’s society and cultural norms that influence how people recognize each other’s faces:
Lead researcher Dr Roberto Caldara [of the University of Glasgow] said: “In a series of eye-movement studies, we showed that social experience has an impact on how people look at faces. Specifically we noticed a striking difference in eye movements in Westerners and East Asian observers. We found that Westerners tend to look at specific features on an individual’s face such as the eyes and mouth whereas East Asian observers tend to focus on the nose or the centre of the face which allows a more general view of all the features. One possible cause of this could be that direct or excessive eye contact may be considered rude in East Asian cultures.”
Teaching a child to “look at me” is common among teaching (and in particular ABA) programs. We never had such a program for my son (who’s been taught primarily via ABA) but have worked on teaching him to focus his eyes and look at things. I used to have “bad eye contact” myself (I was really, really shy as a child) and learned to look at people in the eyes after attending college and graduate school on the East Coast (at some highly competitive institutions) and from years of teaching.
But maybe eye contact is more than a little over-rated.
Tags: asd, asperger, autism, autism blog, culture, disabilities blog, disability, east asia, Education, eye contact, Family, family blog, Health, Parenting, pdd-nos, society
12 opinions for The Eyes Don’t Have It
Emily
Aug 22, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Our sole goal is to have our children at least look in the direction of the person to whom they’re speaking. That way, the person at least knows that they’re the intended interlocutor. We don’t insist on direct eye contact…Dubya has said that it hurts him, and I believe him. It stresses me out, I know.
M
Aug 22, 2008 at 6:09 pm
“But maybe eye contact is more than a little over-rated.”
this probably doesn’t relate to child issues, but i’m conflicted about the relevance of eye-contact. a lot of it has to do with context. generally speaking, it seems over-rated. but my eye-contact is terrible. i generally look at the floor…99 percent of the time it’s okay, there are no consequences for this. however…women tend to flirt with their eyes. at the very least, lack of eye contact can be perceived as lack of interest…it’s easy to push people away without meaning to. so in a context where flirting signals are involved, it can be a problem.
i’m hoping there are ways around it…people will tell you that there are. but it’s still a barrier that pops up from time to time. some of these things, like body language, are so subtle, that i don’t think people realize how important they are, how much they’re at play in our day-to-day interactions.
maybe i can buy glasses with eyes painted on the outside of them, so that i will seem to be making eye-contact? yes, that’s probably the way to go. not weird at all. hoo.
Robin
Aug 22, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I very much agree. How much to adults look eye to eye when talking. I think the goal should be to increase eye contact so that it is in the appropriate range of what others are doing. Teaching to look at objects that one is talking to, a general view of someone talking. I personally think it’s freaky when someones is completely starring at me when I’m talking to them. The typical ABA ‘look at me’ is great to start to teach focus, but it needs to generalized big time
Danni
Aug 22, 2008 at 7:46 pm
When talking to someone, I look in their general direction, and at their mouth if I need to lip-read to understand what they’re saying (if the environment is noisy or my brain is being noisy).
Luckily for me, most people take me looking at their mouths as being eye contact. I can make actual eye contact, but if I’m trying then I end up staring. I also am less able to understand what the person is saying, so it’s not good if I need to listen.
Yes, eye contact is overrated :)
Cliff
Aug 22, 2008 at 8:55 pm
My eye contact is pretty bad (if you will; I don’t value it personally at all, and it is very much standard to say that it is a “good/bad” standard, but I’ll use “bad” for purposes of maintaining social standard where I live), but I’m usually pretty open in that it is exclusively what I do and not meant to intend anything. That honesty usually goes a long-way.
Cliff
Robin H. Morris
Aug 22, 2008 at 9:25 pm
My son was trained in the “look at me” Lovas discreet trial method. He learned, he looks, he responds. He is now 20, and sometimes reacts with a robot cadence to his speech. Life in general has honed his diction, but he still relaxes into an automaton lilt to his speech.
Years ago, I was a guest at a Yale medical school lecture, when they introduced the eye contact theory, demonstrating atypical people watching “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf”. Their eyes concentrated on the chins, shoulders and cheeks of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, as they spewed vulgarities in loud repartee. The typical people looked at the eyes.
What does this mean to us? I actually do believe that we tend to case a person’s whole face, when speaking to them and that includes the eyes.
Kristina, my first sister-in-law is Asian. She never said thank you when given a gift. It was explained to me that it was a cultural thing and it reflected a loss of “face” to reveal personal feelings. Does that relate to the eye contact issue?
xR
Bonnie
Aug 22, 2008 at 9:31 pm
I feel it’s so overrated and find that I can listen better myself if I don’t look one in the eye while they are talking to me. I become distracted, and if someone has a really intense stare, I even experience headache symptoms when trying to listen to them and make eye contact at the same time. I never demand it of Casey, because everyone else does, and oddly, I get it naturally more than anyone else!
Amanda
Aug 23, 2008 at 3:59 am
Robin — didn’t they do a later study where they showed that people with more receptive language problems did not have the same eyegaze behavior as people without them, at all?
Jen
Aug 24, 2008 at 12:09 am
I found out a few years ago that I had poor eye contact, when a child with autism, who obviously had done an eye contact program, grabbed my face and told me to look at him when we were talking to each other. When I had to teach an eye contact program, it was very odd for me. My tendencies are either to look around at everything if I am in an unfamiliar environment, or if there are changes. Otherwise, I turn my ear to the speaker, because my sinuses are often messed up, resulting in my ears feeling slightly blocked usually one moreso than the other. So, I turn the one less blocked to the speaker. This whole thing probably looks the most odd when I tell a student to calm down, slow down, and look at me, then proceed to turn so that they are no longer looking at my face, but at my ear.
Melody
Aug 24, 2008 at 3:44 pm
When I was about 9, and walking home from school, my dad asked me why I wasn’t looking at him as he was talking to me. I said: “Don’t want to be rude.” I knew how eye contact was painful for me, so I figured it was probably painful/embarrassing for most people too, so it would be rude to subject others to such intrusion.
Also, when I look at people’s eyes, then I stop understanding what they’re saying, when I have difficulty with auditory processing even when looking away, eyes closed (but it really jumbles up when I’m looking at someone’s eyes). It’s also quite painful, so usually I’ll look to the wall just behind them, and remember to nod periodically.
Learning All the Time (Whether You Know It Or Not)
Aug 29, 2008 at 3:28 am
[…] all that eye contact may be overrated, college students do need to learn to look up, look people in the eye, and speak clearly and […]
Kristina Chew, PhD
Oct 4, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Over on Science Blogs, Greg Laden has a more extensive review of Caldara’s study and a link to the article in PLOS.
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