the importance of eye contact
The easiest way of showing what you are feeling or to see what another is feeling is the facial expression. Our emotions can be read first from our facial expressions.
eye contact regulates
The mutual rapport of conversation partners comes about by eye contact for an important part. We give each other signals with which we regulate the division of the discussion time. A nod or looking straight into the eyes of the other means for instance permission to continue talking. We get a nasty feeling if the person we are talking to does not look at us.
non-verbal communication
Communication between people in a personal conversation comprises a small verbal part and a larger non-verbal part. Scientific analysis indicates that the non-verbal part of the communication is much larger than the verbal part. The highest figure we found for the verbal part of the communication was 18 %. Most communication scientists however use a lower percentage for various reasons. That therefore indicates that at least 82 % of communication is non-verbal.
Very little is contributed to the improvement of communication between conversation partners if a video communication system does not offer eye contact or if the picture quality is inadequate or if the conversation partners do not look straight into the camera.
sources:
Smit, W., Kennisbank
Williams, E.. Experimental Comparisons of Face-to-Face and Mediated
Communication. A Review. Psychological Bulletin,
Sellen, A. Speech Patterns In Video Mediated Conversations. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Monterey, California .
