In everyday life, when someone looks to the side, we often shift our attention in the same direction. This natural response helps us connect with others, learn from our surroundings, and stay safe. But what happens when we are scared or anxious? In her doctoral research, Master of Education Manman Zhai studied whether emotions influence how we follow another person’s gaze. In her experiments, a group of people was briefly shown pictures to evoke threatening, neutral or positive emotions.
“Surprisingly, when people felt threatened, they tended to ignore gaze signals. This differs from previous findings showing that when someone looks away with a fearful expression, people are especially likely to follow their gaze,” Zhai explains. “Today, we live in an emotionally charged world that differs greatly from the survival-related challenges faced by early humans. Understanding how emotional contexts affect attention could help support people with anxiety, improve human-computer interaction and create better learning environments for children,” Zhai adds.
Eye contact perception is another focus of Zhai’s doctoral research. Seeing someone look away from us may make us think they do not want to talk or are avoiding us. On the other hand, eye contact can feel pleasant as it can make us feel seen, valued and open to connection. However, how we interpret someone’s eye contact is not only about where they are looking. It is also influenced by what we think of them. Zhai examined whether our impressions of a person affect how we perceive their eye contact. Interestingly, when people believed that a person possessed desirable traits, such as kindness or trustworthiness based on how that person behaved in social interaction, they were more likely to interpret even large gaze deviations as eye contact. This, in turn, made them feel more inclined to approach and engage with that person. However, this pattern was only observed when the person was a woman.
“Perhaps women who behave in socially desirable ways match people’s stereotypical expectations of warmth and trustworthiness, leading observers to respond positively to them and feel deserving of their attention. In contrast, men may be perceived as dominant due to stereotypes, which could explain why manipulating their social desirability did not affect people’s perceptions of eye contact. This suggests that our social expectations and gender observations shape how we respond to gaze,” Zhai explains.
Drawing from her previous findings, Zhai notes that being more liberal in interpreting another person as making eye contact may be associated with a greater potential to connect with others. Building on this idea, her work also examined whether people’s perception of eye contact is related to their need to belong as well as to their self-esteem and experienced loneliness. The results showed that men who tend to interpret others as not making eye contact may have a higher need to belong, lower self-esteem, and stronger feelings of loneliness.
“A more negative interpretation of such social cues as gaze appears to be associated with unmet social needs and negative social experiences,” Zhai notes. “These findings have two important implications: first, for developing strategies to reduce negative biases in how people attend to and interpret social information; and second, for creating supportive and inclusive environments that can buffer against the impact of these biases on mental health,” she adds.
Public defence on Saturday 15 November
M.Ed. Manman Zhai’s doctoral dissertation in the field of cognitive psychology titled Looking at Gaze through Social and Emotional Lenses: Attentional and perceptual responses to eye gaze will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Tampere University at 12.00 on Saturday 15 November 2025. The venue is auditorium D11 in Päätalo (main building) on the city centre campus, address Kalevantie 4, Tampere. The Opponent will be Associate Professor Mario Dalmaso, University of Padova. The Custos will be Professor Jari Hietanen from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University.