In December 2024, Associate Professor of Psychology Jennifer Tickle and Julia Fitzpatrick ’23 published an article entitled “Eye contact matters: exploring its influence on interpersonal comfort and self-disclosure in virtual interactions” in the journal Counselling Psychology Quarterly.
Eye contact is known to influence trust and self-disclosure in face-to-face settings, but this study examined whether eye contact in a virtual setting had similar effects. Participants met with a stranger on Zoom and engaged in a semi-structured interaction where they had the opportunity to disclose information about themselves to a stranger. During the interaction, their interaction partner (the experimenter) provided either constant eye contact through the camera, partial eye contact, or little eye contact. As predicted, participants who received high levels of eye contact were more likely than other participants to feel comfortable in the interaction and with sharing information. However, contrary to the hypotheses, eye contact did not significantly affect levels of self-disclosure, even though self-disclosure was significantly related to levels of comfort. Although the study was not conducted in a therapeutic setting, the findings suggest that eye contact levels may be important to the development of rapport and trust which are important factors in clinical contexts.
The paper acknowledges Academic Program Coordinator and Department Web Specialist for Psychology Angela Draheim ’03, April Fraser ’23, Elizabeth Mlinek ’23 and Caroline Taylor ’23 for their assistance in study execution and data collection.
