The 6 Types of Eye Contact

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…are recognitive, evaluative, normative, coordinative, dismissive, and submissive.

A critical component of my plan for social self-improvement is the process of researching, analyzing, modeling (and ultimately predicting) real-world conversations. By far the most infuriating problem I have is the near total lack of actionable socialization procedures in the available literature. Sure, there’s lot of verbosity about the attitudes one is supposed to have upon interaction, and even some conversational topics, but these are generally worthless. (Attitudes are derivative as “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, etc., and reactive conversational topics are impossible to reliably predict.) The advice to “just go out and talk” is obviously begging the question. (Sure, progress is a crawl without practice, but application without theory is hardly optimal.) Even the scientific community presents a rather embarrassing paucity of data. (There’s many scientific papers on social mechanics – such as a single response to a single stimulus. There’s, to my knowledge, zero scientific papers on social dynamics – such as all responses to numerous pluralistic social stimuli. The basic problem is that social dynamics is far too difficult to model dynamically without supercomputers; darn if I ain’t glad to be a computational mathematical modeler!) My plan is analyze successful dynamic social interaction to produce actual analytical results leading to practical procedure. Preliminarily, I've found a number of rather surprising results (I plan to document this completely later on, in case anybody’s actually interested in this stuff), but my research continues apace.

Right now, I find the first and most difficult concept to resolve is eye contact; I'm sure most of the aspies here can relate. I’d like to know if anyone has any feedback on this.

Here is a list of the 6 states of eye contact occurring in conversation that I've found so far, (with parenthetical estimates on the amount of time the contact normally lasts), a quick description of the effect on eye, brow, and head (I’m modeling lips next), as well as implied motivations. [This is a short list. I thought it would be longer, but I just can't find anything else that seems like it needs to be added.]
1) Recognitive: (< 2 seconds) pupil focus, dropped head; show willingness to begin conversation with target
2) Evaluative*: (< 5 seconds) squinting, furrowed brow, cocked head; convince target of high self-value, then reward target with judgment
3) Normative: (continuous)
- Attentive: wide irises; standard appearance
- Directional: directed brow; draw target’s attention
- Reactive: diagonal head movement; show surprise at target’s ingenuity/wittiness
4) Coordinative:
- Involuntary: (< 1 second) fast pupil movement, open brow; share same emotions with target
- Voluntary: (?) squinting, furrowed brow; get target to have emotional reaction
5) Dismissive:
- Passive: (< 2 seconds) focus low, downward head movement; avoid contact with target
- Active: (< 4 seconds) squinting, furrowed brow; show low value of target
6) Submissive: (?) wide irises, open brow; get self-value judgment from target

Does anyone have any feedback on this? Does this list appear authoritative? Can something be added or combined? Do the motivations seem right?

Thanks for your help with this!

* Note on #2, evaluative contact: I’ve always known that this exists, but always considered it manipulative. I haven’t seen it yet in my analysis, but I have memories of alpha-male types who would do this to basically the entire room – I hated this and would always respond with a wink just to screw with them. (I’m not very popular with alpha-male types.) However, I might be creating bias from my memories alone. Does anybody know if the alpha-male types actually do this en-mass?


p.s. Am I being too science-y here? I get few responses to my posts, and I think it might be because I'm intentionally trying to show no emotion.

Oy! I have a hard enough time making any eye contact without observing it and analyzing. Which I would doubless do if I were capable.

The best I do is my advice from years of lecturing - pan and scan the class, aming your gaze at or just over the hairline. It can give the impression that you are a regular guy doing eye contact. But I can barely scan the face at a distance; just about never know what someione's eye color might be.

Holy crap!... If that's what it takes, no wonder we can't do it. Doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun.

You need a category for "creepily intense", I find I hold eye contact far beyond what any normal social cue would require, with no real facial signals at all.

I generally lock eyes with whoever is talking, and look at various things while I'm talking.

Generated quite a few fights as I moved into new neighborhoods, so I guess it's taken as a threat, or just disarming. I dunno, I like the mild adrenaline tingle I get from prolonged eye contact, I'm a junkie!


As for processing social cues, it does indeed take up a huge amount of processing power, my woman has finally gotten used to me blue-screen-of-death-ing sometimes when I get totally overloaded from trying to figure out why the reaction I received differed so dramatically from my models.

She learned it doesn't mean I'm mad, or giving any sort of silent treatment punishment, just that I had to do a force reboot of my MIND... lol.

Hey, thanks for posting that- I always wondered if there were different types of eye contact.

I definitely do number 5 a lot (dismissive-passive) when I see someone looking at me... I don't mean it to look bad, I just feel exposed and look away.

If I'm very comfortable I can do an unfocused direct gaze, like with a family member. Most people I gaze off to the side or into middle distance and then make myself flick my eyes back occasionally to fulfill the obligation. Ironically, if I am very attracted to someone and also if I extremely dislike someone, looking in their eyes is like looking in the Sun.

If social dynamics could be quantized, or even expressed in any qualitative analytic form, dating algorithms would work much better. But so far, as you have noted, an accurate model of social dynamics has been elusive.

Concerning eye contact/facial expressions, you may want to look into cultural/racial variation on the subject. I've heard that Asians rely more on the eyes to analyze expressions, while caucasians focus more on the mouth. Then you also have the issue of the fact that many people with AS, and autism, tend to not utilize eyes much at all in expressions.

Concerning recognition eye contact, you stated that the head drops, however, I've noticed quite frequently that African American men tend to give an upward nod on recognizing someone, rather than a downward nod.

I find that even when my ASish partner and I practice eye contact with each other just for laffs...there is limited expressive value...it seems as though we are amusedly staring through each other's faces..


I have two main kinds...accidental, which gives me the creeps...and begrudging...I manage it briefly to humor the person who has been craning their neck in order to meet my gaze

6! Wow. I never realized. But having seen the list I recognize times when I've used the various different modes.

Could you explain the function of #4:co-ordinative? I didn't quite understand that one.

I think I know what you mean about #2. I guess it's a dominance thing, like "I get to judge you, not the other way round." I tend to use #2 a lot, simply because I question, judge or evaluate what people say a lot, rather than simply accepting or deffering to the other's 'superior wisdom'. I guess it's considered disrespectful to question your 'betters'.

Gosh this is interesting. But I have absolutely no idea whether the list is exhaustive or not.

i guess attaching meaning to eye contact of different kinds might have it make more sense...it just does not come automatically...I would tend to blank out completely on that facet of the interaction..

Very interesting. I don't know if I could train myself to do all of them, but it sounds quite comprehensive.

My mother trained me to "do" eye contact, by getting me to practice with her. But she only taught me to look at the bridge of a person's nose when I was talking to them, and not to hold the gaze too long... if I laughed for example to look away for a moment, or to nod, and look sideways to show I was thinking about something. I don't know that it would be possible to learn to do all this... but perhaps an adult could teach themselves.

Looking forward to seeing what else you put together.

OMG! So many types? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! <runs_away>

Thanks for the post!

I have worked hard on eye contact and can manage sort bouts (one the range of seconds)... But even your post makes me realize I will never master the "normal" continuous eye contact. I always observe this when I watch two people conversing and unfailingly, whenever they happen to look at me for a response or something, I immediately look away and just can't seem to do what they do. But that is the hardest one to do imo.

Wow...

I am a total freak,

I do all of them...

sometimes in one conversation...
it must look like an epilepsy of expressions.
and I also hold eye contact too long I dont have a concept of time, so even if I knew what the time limit was i would need a stop watch to know how long each interval was.
that's what makes me think that I am not ASD (still in denial) and this website is killing me slowly and I cant quit cause i'm a junkie now, knowledge is not good, ignorance is bliss, but I think I must, this crap is just to painful of a realization. all my life I have exhibited a thousand expressions of eye contact, so how am I like ASD?
I just found out about my "selfdiagnoses" within the last week...

The closest Idea I can relate at this time is when you found out who Santa Clause was...

I just found out yesterday that no one I presently know has photographic memory...
here is the clincher I thought everyone does it! just some were lazy, what! you mean that you can not flip through a scrapbook in your mind? and pick in-veritably any moment once you sift through the archives of reels of tape, and see it in full color?! I thought that was just a description of how memory works, you take a picture!

*(mouth totally agape in dismay)

yesterday i was wondering why I have endless expressions for every given moment I suppose you could generalize them but then I would mix and match those into a hundred more sub variants.

totally a freak...

Before last week I could walk around humans and not feel completely alien because I was one of them...
...but I am not.

(acceptance)
I am not human....
(hands now starting to shake)