Maybe we were right about eye contact all the time?

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Kraus, M. W. (2017). Voice-only communication enhances empathic accuracy. American Psychologist, 72(7), 644–654
"This research tests the prediction that voice-only communication increases empathic accuracy over communication across senses. We theorized that people often intentionally communicate their feelings and internal states through the voice, and as such, voice-only communication allows perceivers to focus their attention on the channel of communication most active and accurate in conveying emotions to others. We used 5 experiments to test this hypothesis (N = 1,772), finding that voice-only communication elicits higher rates of empathic accuracy relative to vision-only and multisense communication both while engaging in interactions and perceiving emotions in recorded interactions of strangers. Experiments 4 and 5 reveal that voice-only communication is particularly likely to enhance empathic accuracy through increasing focused attention on the linguistic and paralinguistic vocal cues that accompany speech. Overall, the studies question the primary role of the face in communication of emotion, and offer new insights for improving emotion recognition accuracy in social interactions."
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https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... c_accuracy
[Can also download the pdf of the full thing by clicking the blue link, top right of page]
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Seems to be saying that empathy is more accurate with sound-only communication than it is with vision as well. So could it be that this "you must look at people" stuff isn't so wise as people often assume it to be? What do you think?

I find that looking someone in the eye provides an overwhelming amount of information. If you look at the chin and listen to the words there is a sufficient amount of information to be able to converse.

Yes the face often gets in the way of the job for a lot of us, self included. Interesting, though, that the research is suggesting that might also be the case for NTs.

I guess you look at the chin to reassure them that they've got your attention and / or to fool them into thinking you're doing the normal thing. Me, I do a limited bit of eye contact with people I'm not close to but want to get on with. If they seem to be using a "schmooze face" (a non-genuine smile or fake interest in me), I can't bear to look at that stuff. For those closer to me I look at their faces a lot less when we're communicating, I guess it's because if we're that close then they need to accept me as I really am. Though I might glance at their faces from time to time to see if I can pick up any clues from it. If the research findings are right, it would suggest that the whole face-gazing thing is useless apart from that reassurance value, i.e. just a ritual.

But can that really be the way it is? It seems hard to believe that all those facial expressions do more harm than good for the whole population, when there's been all this stuff found out about how they convey feelings. So what's going on? How do we resolve the paradox?

I doubt there's a paradox; I think there are several factors that haven't been considered. But maybe it's mentioned in the research paper; I haven't read it.

First of all, people tend to judge others' appearance, so the voice-only communication could enhance empathy by removing the possibility of this judgment.

Second of all, it's doubtful whether looking at the eyes/face actually promotes genuine understanding of a person all the time because people tend to mirror others' facial expressions rather than genuinely expressing whatever they are/were feeling before the interaction.

Think of how people smile at babies to elicit a smile from the baby, and how much praise they give the child if the child gives them what they want by smiling back. Think of fake smiles. People get social rewards for mirroring like this and it becomes somewhat instinctive. They bond by pretending to share a mood even if it falsely represents their actually mood.

You are wrong and the truth is something in the middle but it's a bit hard to explain. At least for me but let me try. People communicate emotions several different ways mostly unconsious sometimes consiously. The typical ways to do this is using behaviour and overall bodylanguage, within the nonverbal stuff in voice (sometimes the verbal at well), by using facial expressions and in the expressions of their eyes. Many NTs try to fake facial expressions quite often but the emotions within their voice and their overall body language are rarely faked. Most NTs are to unaware of them to do this. Direct eye contact can establish a quite strong emotional connection. I'm able to do it but sometimes I skip it just because people may become irritated by the uncommon emotions in my eyes.
Many autistic people are either quite unemotional or unable to communicate emotions right in all of the typical ways. Most of us who don't get emotions e.g. from facial expressions or eye contact don't express emotions themself that way too or are totally unaware that they are doing it. Here are many people who have problems to recognize emotions in voice and spoken language at all or to express them this way themself. For this is the initial statement quite wrong or at least doesn't applies to all people here.

Interesting ideas, folks, I'll chew them over, there's a lot in there.
For now, here's one thing:

That alerts me to the observation that the research paper was (in its reductionist way) only testing the ability of an observer to accurately discern emotions, nothing else, so it's a salient point that there's more to human communication than simply picking up on feelings. Some of those things would be advantageous, and some detrimental, to the participants.

Also, I once read that when the Web was fairly new, it was noticed that people were interacting without having to show the usual real-life clues to social status, and that some people were desperately looking around for ways of figuring how to "put that right." It brought home to me just how different I am to "some people," as I found myself hoping they never managed it. It seems that some people feel they absolutely must know a person's social class if they're going to communicate with them. Me, I see it as very helpful if I don't know. I also frequently like to extend that to gender and sexual orientation.