Looking into the eyes of a friend: Evidence from Autism

Eye contact is essential in social situations, conveying key cognitive
and emotional social information. However, some individuals with
autism report difficulty making and maintaining eye contact, describing
it as anxiety provoking and overly intimate, particularly with strangers.
Eye contact in naturalistic situations is scaffolded by social attention to
eyes, which has been found to be atypical amongst those with autism,
potentially due to reduced social motivation lowering the amount of
looking towards the eyes and hence reducing the informational value
that can be drawn from them. Alternatively, emotional contagion
associated with the eyes may lead to an 'empathic over-arousal' in this
population, resulting in reduced eye gaze as an emotional regulation
strategy. Experiences of adolescents with autism will be drawn upon,
providing an 'autistic voice' to the project and insights regarding their
use of eye contact and their friendships (study 1). This will be followed
by examining the influence of emotional closeness (e.g. friends
compared to strangers) on eye gaze atypicalities across the entire
spectrum of those with autism using screen-based eye tracking (study
2). The project will then examine atypicalities across the spectrum,
elucidating any qualitative differences in friendship influences (study 3),
and examining predictors such as anxiety or cognitive and emotional
empathy to suggest mechanisms of atypical eye gaze in those with
autism (study 4). This will develop our theoretical understanding of
mechanisms of eye gaze atypicalities across the broad spectrum of
autism and guide interventions targeting interpersonal difficulties that
may arise from these atypicalities.