At times perceiving direct gaze causes higher autonomic arousal than perceiving averted gaze. Such different responses–notably found between face-to-face and pictorial gaze–have been suggested to be caused by attributing a live gazer with the ability to see: The direct gaze of a live onlooker may cause people to think that they are seen and heighten autonomic arousal. Being seen has also been linked with changes in self-awareness. We wanted to examine if the thought of being seen paired with a direct gaze would intensify autonomic activation and heighten subjectively reported self-awareness and arousal when compared to averted gaze and not beeing seen. To separate live gazing stimuli from the ability to see we used live-feed of a face on a television screen, and varied the reciprocity of a video link. The participants could see the face of the model in both conditions, but the model was claimed to be able to see them only in the reciprocal condition.

Autonomic skin conductivity responses (SCR) and self-report data on arousal, self-awareness and social presence from 18 healthy adult participants were analyzed with robust modern methods. Contrary to expectations, psychophysiological arousal did not accompany the mental-state attribution of gaze as “seeing”: Neither the main effect of the reciprocity of the video link nor the main effect of gaze direction nor the interaction between them was statistically significant. Nevertheless self-reported arousal heightened to reciprocal gaze in comparison with nonreciprocal gaze, as subjective ratings of emotional arousal showed a main effect for the presence of the reciprocal link. Gaze direction, however, did not significantly affect self-reported arousal and there was no interaction between gaze direction and reciprocity. Nonetheless the locus of awareness was affected by the mental attribution of gaze as seeing: The reciprocity of the link significantly heightened self-reported public self-awareness and the nonreciprocity of the link significantly heightened self-reported awareness of the environment. Neither gaze direction nor the reciprocity of the video link had an effect on either self-reported valence or felt social presence.

According to our results the mental attribution of being seen does not have an effect on arousal, but it makes people focus on themselves and changes the way they perceive their arousal state. Previously reported larger autonomic responses to direct gaze than averted gaze are suggested to capture the affective significance of both physical and social presence and be further affected by adequacy judgments. Effects of stimulus mediation through a video-link are discussed. Further research is called for to confirm the results and to better understand how these factors may modulate autonomic arousal when perceiving gaze.

KEY WORDS: Eye contact, gaze direction, skin conductance responses, SCR, mental attributions, public self-awareness, presence