Different perspectives/theories on eye contact

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Learning to make eye contact is a good start, but developing heuristics that work for the variations between "challenging", "accepting", "interested" and so forth is hard.

I do (unconsciously) facial stuff that triggers off fight-or-flight responses in NTs too, which hasn't helped.

Hi, I'm either a starer or a look-awayer..;it depends. If I'm being asked difficult questions about feelings (like with my therapist) I have to look away. It's like it's hard to feel when concentrating on looking/translating what the "other" is saying. So to try and understand what the other person wants, I have to stare....

Either way, eye contact is hard. I have a childhood packed with my parents saying "Stop staring", "Take that look off your face" etc. or conversly, "Look at me when I'm speaking to you".

I spent hours in front of the mirror over the years to try and understand what my face was doing - it was only when I understood about Aspergers that things became manageable. This thread is so reassuring. Thanks everyone. I've been floating around the forum for a while but rarely posted. This time I had to join in as I was touched by the posts.

I just did some tests on the BBC psychology pages and realised that I still have big problems dealing with eye contact. Largely because when I just look at the eyes, I don't understand the emotion the other person is exhibiting. I need lots of other visual clues - posture, tilt of head, tone of voice. With eyes and mouth alone I really don't get it. It's like there is nothing there, emptyness, and that is very hard, it makes me very anxious. So I stare to try and translate....or look away to try and read other signs....I'm 50 now so it's easier - experience has helped me to learn some stuff. I like to see people in good light as I find seeing what the pupil is doing is a good clue when added in - but that can freak some people out as it really is staring. And once I've "got" the message, I look away again to process what it makes me feel.

Do others have similar strategies? I would love to be able to be more spontaneous but when I try, I often get it wrong

I generally rely almost exclusively on tone of voice to interpret emotional content, although I'll sometimes glance at a person's face (without eye contact) to be sure. Like you, when I do make eye contact (even now, having trained myself to tolerate it somewhat), that tends to overwhelm my ability to process anything else.

I think it may be related to difficulty multi-tasking. Eye contact triggers some kind of subconscious assessment of the other person's face. Is this person/face threatening or friendly, aggressive or timid, interested or uninterested, etc...? Normal people are able to carry on with a separate train of thought with this processing relegated to the background. Something tells me that autistic people can't relegate this emotional processing to the background, which leads to a sense of mental overload/jarring. I know I often have to stare off into the distance or even close my eyes completely in order to recall information. Also, my background emotional state has a big effect on setting the overload threshold. The more stress I feel the more I have to avoid eye contact in order to think clearly.

I'm uncomfortable with eye contact. I can't say it triggers fear or that it overwhelms me. I'm just uncomfortable. Then I talk so much with my eyes - people can read what I'm thinking and feeling, regardless of my body language and voice, just by looking in my eyes - that I don't like people knowing more about me than what I'm saying. If I'm attracted to someone, I really avoid making eye contact!

I've met people with "dead eyes". If I've met anyone who is as communicative with their eyes as I am, they certainly control it better. I can't control it.

Mine gets really bad when my wife is scolding me.

It becomes a downward spiral with her yelling "look me in the eye" (did she read the book? ).

At work I fake it pretty well.

A book that helped me overcome this is called How To Talk To Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships. Before this book and a self-help book I read about how to date women, I was a nightmare. After, I wrote down my interpretations of the tricks and I would read them as much as possible before I would enter work or be in a social environment. Among the first 3 tricks in the book, 2 discuss the importance of eye contact and WHY. This book is highly reputable and I was stunned when I read it.

I do struggle with eye contact, i usually look at their face as a whole rather than the eyes.

Strangely though, i don't feel intimidated, i worry about intimidating other people if anything. I know that if i wanted to just look straight at someones eyes i could, there's nothing stopping me, it's just i really worry about what they'd see in my eyes. Probably nothing and that'd scare the s**t out of them. So in a sense, do i do it for them? to make them comfortable with me? I dunno why i find it so important to put people at ease.

I have always had issues with eye contact, but recently I've had much improvement. I find for me its always controlling my anxiety around people, trying to stay clam yet focused. If I am too calm, I will avoid eye contact too much. If I get too overly anxious and focused, I stare into people eyes and look overly agressive. Sometimes I can strike the perfect balance and get "in the zone", but any minor interruptions can throw me way off again.

I have noticed that in my efforts to look at people's eyes more, it makes me perceive them more as objects and less as people. Looking at them is, more and more, a task that I do, and their face is an object that I have to look at to complete my task, so that for the time that I'm looking in their eyes they become a (distracting) object. It's odd that most people feel like it increases their sens of connection and personal contact, and for me it decreases it. It feels like I'm trying to do something to them, rather than work with them.

It is frustrating and I still havent learned how to look at people properly. I either have to look away or as I have recently been told, I stare and people find it intimidating.

I am completely unaware of how I do in the eye contact area. I had one therapist who sent me for an AS diagnosis based on my lack of eye contact among other factors. I recently had my first session with a different therapist who is an Autism specialist and her feedback was that she thought I had good eye contact.

I guess the key is to solicit feedback from people you can trust who are safe. (Parents are never safe for some reason.)

My eye contact has gotten a lot better over time, starting when I was a kid and getting punished for not making eye contact, to being an adult and trying to fit in better (i had no idea at the time that I had Aspergers). But when I had and have a reaction, it's real fear to meet someone's eyes. I have no idea why. The other day one of the big bosses at work - a very quiet, gentle man - stopped to speak with me just to be friendly, and I thought I would die meeting his eyes. But I did it. Did fear show on my face? I have no idea. But I was feeling it big-time.