Psychology major Julia Fitzpatrick '23 recently presented on directed research conducted with Associate Professor of Psychology and Interim Assistant Dean of Faculty Jennifer Tickle. She presented "The Effects of Eye Contact on Self Disclosure and Trust" as virtual poster at the L. Starling Reid Undergraduate Psychology Conference on April 15, 2022, and then presented the same research as a short talk at the Lehigh Valley Association of Independent College (LVAIC) Undergraduate Psychology Conference on April 23, 2022. This work was previously presented at the March 2022 Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association.
This study is an extension of previous research that suggests that eye contact, even in online interactions, is critical to the establishment of the trust and self-disclosure necessary for the therapeutic relationship. This study used a sample of college students to examine trust and self-disclosure after being exposed to either no, moderate, or high levels of eye contact in a structured online interaction using a modified version of the Relationship Closeness Induction Task (RCIT; Sedikides et al., 1999). Participants then filled out a survey reporting trust in the interaction, self-disclosure in the interaction, general self-disclosure tendencies, and demographic information. Results found that there was a significant effect of eye contact on how comfortable participants felt overall, whether participants would want to interact with their interaction partner again, and how personal the researchers felt participants' answers were. Even though some analyses involving trust and self-disclosure did not yield significant results, the means were still in the hypothesized direction. The analyses were underpowered, so future research should examine these effects in a larger sample. Even after the pandemic, people may choose to conduct meetings or therapy online. Therefore, researchers can use these findings to further consider the effects that eye contact has in online interactions and they can develop recommendations to facilitate more disclosure and trust in these environments.
Fitzpatrick will go on to work with Dr. Tickle for her St. Mary's Project in Psychology in AY22-23.
