ReviewFrontiers in psychology2018
Affective Eye Contact: An Integrative Review.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed.
- Avoidance behaviour generalizes to eye processing in posttraumatic stress disorder.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2022Trial
- Feasibility of a Novel Eye Gaze Shift Task in Autism Assessment: A Pilot Study.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- Spectator to a Meeting of Minds: Vicarious Eye Contact Elicits Psychophysiological Responses in the Observer.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Social interactions and loneliness in daily life: A study of younger adults and cognitively diverse older adults.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- The links between direct gaze and social cognition - implications for impression accuracy and joint attention.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The link between basic visual processing and higher-level social cognition: Eye gaze perception as a bridge in a transdiagnostic sample enriched with social dysfunction.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Enhanced awareness of faces with slight downwards gazes in the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- When the evolved social mind goes online: How digital ecologies recalibrate mentalizing and social bonding.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Inferences about women's traits influence the judgment of their eye contact.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Investigating the gaze-driven reversed congruency effect in the spatial Stroop task: A distributional approach.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Don't look at the camera: Achieving perceived eye contact in remote video communication.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Uncovering everyday attention in the lab: front-viewed heads boost overt social orienting.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Deliberate and Self-Conscious Adaptation of Eye-Contact by Autistic Adults.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- Direct and averted gaze modulate the event-related brain responses to social exclusion signals.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Can humanoid robots be used as a cognitive offloading tool?Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Review
- Girls with higher levels of suicidal ideation experienced less parental reciprocity of eye-contact and positive facial affect during conflictual interactions: A pilot study.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- Practical tips for delivering high impact live virtual lectures in interventional pain medicine.Interventional pain medicine · 2025Article
- The fundamentals of eye tracking part 2: From research question to operationalization.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- The perception of eye contact is associated with men's need to belong, self-esteem, and loneliness.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
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Abstract
In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals' direct gaze has robust effects on various attentional and cognitive processes. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to investigating the affective effects triggered by eye contact. This article reviews research concerning the effects of others' gaze direction on observers' affective responses. The review focuses on studies in which affective reactions have been investigated in well-controlled laboratory experiments, and in which contextual factors possibly influencing perceivers' affects have been controlled. Two important themes emerged from this review. First, explicit affective evaluations of seeing another's direct versus averted gaze have resulted in rather inconsistent findings; some studies report more positive subjective feelings to direct compared to averted gaze, whereas others report the opposite pattern. These contradictory findings may be related, for example, to differences between studies in terms of the capability of direct-gaze stimuli to elicit feelings of self-involvement. Second, studies relying on various implicit measures have reported more consistent results; they indicate that direct gaze increases affective arousal, and more importantly, that eye contact automatically evokes a positively valenced affective reaction. Based on the review, possible psychological mechanisms for the positive affective reactions elicited by eye contact are described.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.