The effects of service dogs on social acknowledgments of people in wheelchairs

Able-bodied people often exhibit behaviors that show them to be socially uncomfortable upon encountering a physically disabled stranger. These behaviors include less eye contact, gaze avoidance, greater personal distance, and briefer social interactions. This study examined whether persons in wheelchairs with service dogs receive more frequent social acknowledgement from able-bodied strangers than people in wheelchairs without dogs receive. Behaviors of passersby were recorded by an observer who followed a person in a wheelchair at a distance of 15 to 30 feet. Observations were made in public areas amid pedestrian traffic, areas such as shopping malls and a college campus. The behaviors of passersby to the person in a wheelchair, with or without a service dog, were recorded, including smiles, conversation, touch, gaze aversion, path avoidance, or no response. Results indicated that both smiles and conversations from passersby increased significantly when the dogs were present. These findings suggest that the benefits of service dogs for their owners extend beyond working tasks to include enhanced opportunities for social exchange. The service dogs substantially reduced the tendency of able-bodied people to ignore or avoid the disabled person.     

When your face doesn't fit: employment discrimination against people with facial disfigurements

This study aimed to investigate the recruitment prospects of people with facial disfigurement and a contrasting group of wheelchair users, representing a functional impairment with little aesthetic impact. Three applications were made to each of 144 vacancies using three CVs and cover letters rotated around conditions in which one applicant was described as a wheelchair user, another had a noncontagious facial disfigurement, and the third (control condition) had neither. There was evidence of discrimination against people with facial disfigurement in jobs requiring high (but not low) levels of customer contact, and against wheelchair users for jobs entailing high or low‐customer contact. Aesthetic considerations, social norms, and the possibility of stigma by association are discussed as potential underlying factors.     

Actual and perceived attitudes of wheelchair users

The sub-section of the disabled population who use a wheelchair has largely been neglected in the research Concerned with attitudes towards people with a disability. This study had two aims: firstly, to compare the attitudes towards wheelchair users of able-bodied people with people who actually use a wheelchair, and secondly, to examine the difference between how each group perceives the attitudes of the other towards this condition. The results revealed a number of interesting differences between the expressed attitudes of the two groups, although their overall mean scores were comparable. The wheelchair user group were found to believe non-disabled people to hold more negative attitudes than they actually expressed. A few age and sex differences were found, as well as a number of differences depending on whether the respondents had congenital or acquired disabilities. Finally, the amount of contact with those using wheelchairs was found to be associated with slightly more realistic attitudes among the non-disabled respondents. The results are discussed in the light of previous research, and possible reasons for, and ways to counter, the lack of empathy between the two groups are considered.     

Effects of counselor's eye contact on student-clients' perceptions

This study investigated the effects of amount and direction of eye contact with the counselor on a student's perceptions. 48 undergraduate and graduate education majors were randomly assigned to one of six conditions in a 2 x 3 factorial design representing two levels of eye direction (eye-to-eye and eye-to-nose/mouth) and three amounts of eye contact (high = 85%, medium = 50%, low = 15%). Subjects had 10-min. standard interviews that differed only according to the six experimental conditions. Interviews were videotaped to assess maintenance of experimental conditons. Following the interview, subjects rated (5-high to 1-low) the interview on seven variables (comfort, attention, interest, ease, helpfulness, eye contact, and willingness to return). Interrater reliability for maintenance of experimental conditions was .87 on amount of eye contact and .03 for direction. Scheffé comparisons showed high and medium eye contact produced significantly higher ratings by student clients on attention, interest, eye contact, and willingness to return than low eye contact. There were no differences for direction of eye contact.     

Effect of VDT keyboard height and inclination on musculoskeletal discomfort for wheelchair users

This study investigated the effect of keyboard height and inclination on musculoskeletal discomfort for wheelchair users. Eight Taiwanese male wheelchair users (28.75 +/- 8.75 years) were recruited as participants to perform nine experimental combinations of data entry tasks. Three keyboard heights and three inclinations were evaluated. Musculoskeletal discomfort was estimated by Rating of Perceived Exertion and Subjective Preference Ranking. Each subject performed a data entry task for all nine experimental combinations in a random order. The seated posture of all participants during the data entry operation was the upright posture. The height of the screen's center was adjusted according to the eye level of each subject. Analysis showed the keyboard height and keyboard inclination significantly affected rating of musculoskeletal discomfort. It is suggested that the optimum keyboard height choice is elbow-level height or 5 cm below elbow level with the keyboard inclination horizontal to the seat of the wheelchair.     

The effect of drivers’ eye contact on pedestrians’ perceived safety

Many fatal accidents that involve pedestrians occur at road crossings, and are attributed to a breakdown of communication between pedestrians and drivers. Thus, it is important to investigate how forms of communication in traffic, such as eye contact, influence crossing decisions. Thus far, there is little information about the effect of drivers’ eye contact on pedestrians’ perceived safety to cross the road. Existing studies treat eye contact as immutable, i.e., it is either present or absent in the whole interaction, an approach that overlooks the effect of the timing of eye contact. We present an online crowdsourced study that addresses this research gap. 1835 participants viewed 13 videos of an approaching car twice, in random order, and held a key whenever they felt safe to cross. The videos differed in terms of whether the car yielded or not, whether the car driver made eye contact or not, and the times when the driver made eye contact. Participants also answered questions about their perceived intuitiveness of the driver’s eye contact behavior. The results showed that eye contact made people feel considerably safer to cross compared to no eye contact (an increase in keypress percentage from 31% to 50% was observed). In addition, the initiation and termination of eye contact affected perceived safety to cross more strongly than continuous eye contact and a lack of it, respectively. The car’s motion, however, was a more dominant factor. Additionally, the driver’s eye contact when the car braked was considered intuitive, and when it drove off, counterintuitive. In summary, this study demonstrates for the first time how drivers’ eye contact affects pedestrians’ perceived safety as a function of time in a dynamic scenario and questions the notion in recent literature that eye contact in road interactions is dispensable. These findings may be of interest in the development of automated vehicles (AVs), where the driver of the AV might not always be paying attention to the environment.     

Perceptions of speakers with minimal eye contact: Implications for stutterers

One hundred and thirty-three college students responded to percentage definitions of “good,” “minimal,” and “no” eye contact. They also judged their perceptions of a speaker with “little or no eye contact” on a semantic differential scale containing 60 polarized adjective pairs regarding personality traits. The majority of the student respondents defined an individual with “good” eye contact as looking at his/her audience/listener 90–100% of the time. This is a more stringent definition than other literature has indicated. Furthermore, speakers with little or no eye contact were judged less favorably on 70% of the items, which indicates that low eye contact adversely affects perceptions of a speaker's personality. Therefore, stutterers need to be made aware of the importance of and determinants of effective eye contact in communication. Also, the development of effective eye contact needs to be incorporated as a major goal in stuttering therapy.     

Eye contact as an antecedent to compliant behavior

Many experimenters and practitioners regard eye contact between instructor and learner as a facilitator, if not a prerequisite, to the effective instruction of sighted people. Without scientifically supporting the practice of demanding eye contact, experimenters, nonetheless, advocate its use and offer a variety of procedures to promote its acquisition. To justify the widespread use of demanded eye contact and to explain its role functionally, one experiment and data from six replications with nine subjects are presented. The primary experiment provides an empirical base for the training of eye contact prior to instruction. In a multiple-baseline design across two students demanded eye contact resulted in levels of compliance that were double and triple those of baseline. A tentative functional analysis of demanded eye contact is presented, followed by a discussion of the relationship of eye contact to attending.     

Assessment of the contact eye cover as an effective method of restricting visual input

In the wake of several studies that have cast doubt upon the effectiveness of contact eye covers in restricting vision, we performed a series of five experiments to the end of achieving reversible blinding of the albino rat. The data of Experiment 1 indicated that the contact eye cover can be as effective as a rubber cup in restricting visual input. In Experiment 2, animals that were fitted binocularly with opaque eye covers performed as if blind on a task involving acquisition of pattern discrimination. In Experiment 3, binocular coverage with the opaque eye cover resulted in chance performance across 300 trials of a previously acquired pattern-discrimination habit. In Experiment 4, the base diameter of the eye cover was found to be a critical factor: Performance of a previously acquired brightness discrimination was reduced to chance levels by contact eye covers that approximated 7.0 mm in diameter. In Experiment 5, a smaller eye cover (6-mm diam) had no effect in limiting the visually evoked electrocortical response of the albino rat, while an eye cover of 7.2-mm diam produced a reliable attenuation of the response. The collective results indicate that appropriately fabricated contact eye covers are a viable means of restricting visual input and may justifiably be considered contact occluders.     

The power of subliminal and supraliminal eye contact on social decision making: An individual-difference perspective

We conducted two experiments to explore how social decision making is influenced by the interaction of eye contact and social value orientation (SVO). Specifically, participants with a Prosocial (Prosocials) or a Proself (Proselfs) SVO played Prisoner Dilemma games with a computer partner following supraliminal (Experiment 1) and subliminal (Experiment 2) direct gaze from that partner. Results showed that participants made more cooperative decisions after supraliminal eye contact than no eye contact, and the effect only existed for the Prosocials but not for the Proselfs. Nevertheless, when the computer partner made a subliminal eye contact with the participants, although more cooperative choices were found among the Prosocials following subliminal eye contact, relative to no contact, the Proselfs demonstrated reduced cooperation rates. These findings suggest that Prosocials and Proselfs interpreted eye contact in distinct ways at different levels of awareness, which led to various social decision making.     

The cost of being watched: Stroop interference increases under concomitant eye contact

Current models in social neuroscience advance that eye contact may automatically recruit cognitive resources. Here, we directly tested this hypothesis by evaluating the distracting strength of eye contact on concurrent visual processing in the well-known Stroop’s paradigm. As expected, participants showed stronger Stroop interference under concomitant eye contact as compared to closed eyes. Two control experiments allowed ruling out low-level account of this effect as well as non-specific effect of the presence of open eyes. This suggests that refraining from processing eye contact is actually as difficult as refraining from word reading in the Stroop task. Crucially, the eye contact effect was obtained while gaze was not under the direct focus of attention and the participants were faced with another powerful distracter (the incongruent word) in the task at hand. Thus, there is a cost of being watched even in circumstances where the processing of direct gaze is strongly disfavored. The present results emphasize the crucial status of eye contact in human cognition.     

Using computer‐assisted instruction to increase the eye gaze of children with autism

Many children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders have difficulty making appropriate eye contact and engaging in joint attention. The current study evaluated a computer‐assisted instruction package (pairing visual stimuli with vocal stimuli) as a novel treatment to improve the eye gaze accuracy in 3 elementary school children with autism. The researchers measured the latency from a recorded verbal stimulus to the students making eye contact with pictures of familiar individuals displayed on a computer screen, and the duration for which eye gaze on the stimulus was maintained. An automated infrared camera system for measuring eye gaze was utilized that eliminated the need for an instructor to make subjective judgments regarding participants' eye gaze. For all three participants, duration of eye contact increased, and latency to responding decreased following exposure to the computer‐assisted instruction. The implications of these findings for the treatment of individuals with autism are discussed, along with suggestions for future research on the topic.     

Effects of Eye Contact on the Evaluation of Job Applicants

This experiment attempted to determine if eye contact affects job interviewers' evaluations of applicants. Photographs were taken of a male and a female in two eye positions: looking straight into the camera and looking downward. Forty-four job interviewers in an employment agency were randomly assigned to one of the four photographs. Each subject was told to assume that he or she was interviewing the stimulus person for a job as a management trainee and was instructed to rate the stimulus person on a series of scales. The findings supported the hypothesis that eye contact is a determinant of the decision to hire. The findings also suggested that the effects of eye contact are mediated by the perceived attributes of applicants; that is, eye contact affected the interviewers' evaluations of the applicants, and those evaluations were related to the decision to hire.     

Preschoolers' use of eye contact while speaking: The influence of sex,age, and conversational partner

The influences of sex, age, and conversational, partner (mother vs. stranger) on eye contact during verbalizations were examined in a longitudinal study of 33 children at 2 and 4 years of age. A free-play sample was obtained of each child interacting with mother and with a male or female experimenter. The amount of eye contact in conjunction with verbalization was analyzed. Significant main effects were found for sex (females engaged in a higher percent of eye contact than males) and conversational partner (more eye contact while speaking exhibited to experimenter than to mother). There was an interaction between age and conversational partner, in that mother received more and experimenter relatively less percent of eye contact during verbalizations as children got older. Notably, there was no main effect for age. These results revealed sex differences at an age (2–2 1/2 years) and in a context (free-play setting) not previously studied, demonstrating the robustness of the effect. Further, age findings seem indicative of unique developmental trends for eye contact during verbalizations for the ages between 2 and 4 years.Mount Saint Vicent University     

USING PERCENTILE SCHEDULES TO INCREASE EYE CONTACT IN CHILDREN WITH FRAGILE X SYNDROME

Aversion to eye contact is a common behavior of individuals diagnosed with Fragile X syndrome (FXS); however, no studies to date have attempted to increase eye‐contact duration in these individuals. In this study, we employed a percentile reinforcement schedule with and without overcorrection to shape eye‐contact duration of 6 boys with FXS. Results showed that although aversion to eye contact is often thought to be unamenable to change in FXS, it can be shaped in some individuals using percentile schedules either alone or in combination with overcorrection.     

Sex differences in the effects of visual contact and eye contact in negotiations

Previous research has proposed that the ability to see others would benefit negotiations. We argue that this view is too narrow and that the impact of visual contact on negotiated agreements depends on the meaning individuals ascribe to either its presence or absence. Based on previous research showing that females are more likely to understand others in the presence of visual contact while males understand others better in the absence of visual contact, we explore how visual contact, eye contact, and sex affect the quality of negotiated agreements in a meta-analysis (Study 1) and a laboratory experiment (Study 2). The two studies combined show that because direct communication via the face facilitates a shared understanding for two unacquainted females, their agreements are of higher quality when they have visual contact compared to when they do not (Study 1), and if they have visual contact, their agreements are better when they have eye contact than when they do not (Study 2). Because communication via the face increases discomfort between two unacquainted males, their agreements are of higher quality when they do not have visual contact (Study 1), and if they do have visual contact, their agreements are better when they have no eye contact than when they do (Study 2).     

Fluency and eye contact as factors influencing observers' perceptions of stutterers

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of different levels of eye contact and fluency on observers' perceptions of a speaker. One of four videotapes depicting an actor (playing the part of a supervisor) interviewing another actor (who played a subordinate) were shown to 127 college students. The four videotapes represented four different conditions comprising combinations of fluent vs nonfluent speech and normal vs low eye contact. Results indicated that these combinations of fluency and eye contact differentially influence listeners' perceptions of a speaker. Highest ratings were obtained for the fluent-normal eye-contact speaker, with lower ratings for all other conditions. In addition, it was determined that the frequency of eye contact rather than fluency was more strongly related to listeners' perceptions. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The effect of witnessing consequences on the behavioral recordings of experimental observers

The cueing effects of interviewer praise contingent on a target behavior and expectation of behavior change were examined with six observers. Experiment I investigated the effect of cues in conjunction with expectation. Experiment II assessed the relative contributions of cues and expectation, and Experiment III examined the effect of cues in the absence of expectation. The frequencies of two behaviors, client eye contact and face touching, were held constant throughout a series of videotaped interviews between an "interviewer" and a "client". A within-subjects design was used in each experiment. During baseline conditions, praise did not follow eye contact by the client on the videotape. In all experimental conditions, praise statements from the interviewer followed each occurrence of eye contact with an equal number of praises delivered at random times when there was no eye contact. Three of the six observers dramatically increased their recordings of eye contact during the first experimental phase, but these increases were not replicated in a second praise condition. There were no systematic changes in recorded face touching. Witnessing the delivery of consequences, rather than expectation seemed to be responsible for the effect. This potential threat to the internal validity of studies using observational data may go undetected by interobserver agreement checks.     

RELATIONAL MESSAGES ASSOCIATED WITH NONVERBAL BEHAVIORS

Based on the assumptions that relational messages are multidimensional and that they are frequently communicated by nonverbal cues, this experiment manipulated five nonverbal cues -eye contact, proximity, body lean, smiling, and touch - to determine what meanings they convey along four relational message dimensions. Subjects (N= 150) observed 2 out of 40 videotaped conversational segments in which a male-female dyad presented various combinations of the nonverbal cues. High eye contact, close proximity, forward body lean, and smiling all conveyed greater intimacy, attraction, and trust. Low eye contact, a distal position, backward body lean, and the absence of smiling and touch communicated greater detachment. High eye contact, close proximity, and smiling also communicated less emotional arousal and greater composure, while high eye contact and close proximity alone conveyed greater dominance and control. Effects of combinations of cues and sex-differences are also reported.     

Relations among Social Anxiety,Eye Contact Avoidance,State Anxiety,and Perception of Interaction Performance during a Live Conversation

There is building evidence that highly socially anxious (HSA) individuals frequently avoid making eye contact, which may contribute to less meaningful social interactions and maintenance of social anxiety symptoms. However, research to date is lacking in ecological validity due to the usage of either static or pre-recorded facial stimuli or subjective coding of eye contact. The current study examined the relationships among trait social anxiety, eye contact avoidance, state anxiety, and participants’ self-perceptions of interaction performance during a live, four-minute conversation with a confederate via webcam, and while being covertly eye-tracked. Participants included undergraduate women who conversed with same-sex confederates. Results indicated that trait social anxiety was inversely related to eye contact duration and frequency averaged across the four minutes, and positively related to state social anxiety and negative self-ratings. In addition, greater anticipatory state anxiety was associated with reduced eye contact throughout the first minute of the conversation. Eye contact was not related to post-task state anxiety or self-perception of poor performance; although, trends emerged in which these relations may be positive for HSA individuals. The current findings provide enhanced support for the notion that eye contact avoidance is an important feature of social anxiety.