Social contact often initially depends on ascertaining the direction of the other person's gaze. We determined the brain areas involved in gaze monitoring by a functional neuroimaging study. Discrimination between the direction of gaze significantly activated a region in the left amygdala during eye-contact and no eye-contact tasks to the same extent. However, a region in the right amygdala was...

Eye contact and pointing are typical gestures in order to direct another individual's attention toward a target. We previously investigated on Japanese monkeys whether joint attention ability encouraged by eye contact and pointing was associated with the imitation of human's actions. The monkeys with the joint attention skills showed the imitation of human's actions. In the current study, we in...

Fast and accurate judgment of whether another person is making eye contact or not is crucial for our social interaction. As affective states have been shown to influence social perceptions and judgments, we investigated the influence of observers' own affective states and trait anxiety on their eye contact judgments. In two experiments, participants were required to judge whether animated faces...

Non-verbal communication, such as eye contact between drivers and pedestrians, has been regarded one way to reduce accident risk. So far, studies have assumed rather than objectively measured the occurrence of contact. We address this research gap by developing an detection method testing it in indoor experiment with scripted driver–pedestrian interactions at a pedestrian crossing. Thirty parti...

The aim of this article is to try to establish any observable regularities between the vocal and the visual expression of disfluency markers in a French spontaneous dialogue. The data show different configurations for different types of disfluency markers. Thus “euh”s are typically accompanied by mutual eye contact and no gesture; interrupted eye contact takes place less frequently, on occasion...

Amniotic fluid was analysed for foetal testosterone (FT) level. Postnatally, the infants (29 girls and 41 boys) and parents were filmed at 12 months of age, and the amount of eye contact made by the infant to the parent was recorded. Girls made significantly more eye contact than boys. This replicates previous studies showing a female superiority in sociality more broadly, and eye contact in pa...

We investigated whether eye contact is aversive and negatively arousing for adolescents with social anxiety disorder (SAD). Participants were 17 adolescents with clinically diagnosed SAD and 17 age- and sex-matched controls. While participants viewed the stimuli, a real person with either direct gaze (eye contact), averted gaze, or closed eyes, we measured autonomic arousal (skin conductance re...