Conjugate Lateral Eye Movement and Interpersonal Arousal: Effects of Interviewer Sex and Topic Intimacy

An experiment was conducted to examine the generalizability of the interpersonal arousal effect on conjugate lateral eye movement. Sixty male subjects were interviewed twice, once by a male and once by a female experimenter, in counter-balanced order. Neutral and mildly intimate questions were included in both interviews. Subjects were classified as either right-movers, left-movers, or bidirectionals on the basis of their responses in the male interviewer, neutral question condition. A statistically significant interaction between dominant direction and interviewer sex was found on direction of subjects' eye movements, with differential eye movement tendencies of subjects increasing under the female interviewer, compared to the male interviewer, condition. This effect was statistically significant for right-movers only. An expected interaction between dominant direction and topic intimacy did not occur.