Are you looking my way? Ostracism widens the cone of gaze

ABSTRACT

Ostracized individuals demonstrate an increased need for belonging. To satisfy this need, they search for signals of inclusion, one of which may be another person’s gaze directed at oneself. We tested if ostracized, compared to included, individuals judge a greater degree of averted gaze as still being direct. This range of gaze angles still viewed as direct has been dubbed “the cone of (direct) gaze”. In the current research, ostracized and included participants viewed friendly-looking face stimuli with direct or slightly averted gaze (0°, 2°, 4°, 6°, and 8° to the left and to the right) and judged whether stimulus persons were looking at them or not. Ostracized individuals demonstrated a wider gaze cone than included individuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Cone of gaze
• Eye contact perception
• Gaze perception
• Ostracism

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank Aleksi Syrjämäki for his help in implementation of the Cyberball game and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under the Human Mind Research Programme [grant number 266187 to J.K.H.].