Difficulty with eye contact may be a sign of a good conversationalist, study finds

Averting one's eyes gives us more brain power to focus on word selection

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in the 2015 film, Carol

Eye contact is a bizarre human obsession. Too little is considered skittish, too much borderline psychopathic, and the spectrum in between can make or break a date, meeting or catch-up.

But why do we struggle to maintain it, and why do we feel the urge to look away? A pair of researchers from Kyoto University have been looking into it and, in a paper published in the journal Cognition, they present a possible explanation following a study.

Volunteers were asked to play a simple word association game, the pair finding that, for more challenging words, they would need a little longer, but this time was cut down if they broke eye contact.

After examining the data, the researchers found that (as per MedicalXpress):

“The dual task of maintaining eye contact (and the inherent intimate connection it involves) while also racking the brain for a word to meet the request is just too demanding - to save itself, the brain pushes for breaking eye contact so it can focus exclusively on finding a word that will fulfill the obligation.”

Essentially, breaking eye contact allows us to better choose our words. Looking someone in the eye may help us better establish an emotional rapport, but looking elsewhere may actually stimulate better conversation.

The abstract for ‘When we cannot speak: Eye contact disrupts resources available to cognitive control processes during verb generation’ by Shogo Kajimura et al:

'Although eye contact and verbal processing appear independent, people frequently avert their eyes from interlocutors during conversation. This suggests that there is interference between these processes. We hypothesized that such interference occurs because both processes share cognitive resources of a domain-general system and explored the influence of eye contact on simultaneous verb generation processes (i.e., retrieval and selection). In the present experiment, viewing a movie of faces with eyes directed toward the viewer delayed verbal generation more than a movie of faces with averted eyes; however, this effect was only present when both retrieval and selection demands were high. The results support the hypothesis that eye contact shares domain-general cognitive resource with verb generation. This further indicates that a full understanding of functional and dysfunctional communication must consider the interaction and interference of verbal and non-verbal channels.'