Dr. Frank McAndrew

If it's a threatening or aggressive or unpleasant interaction, more eye contact makes it more unpleasant.

There was a study done a bazillion years ago where they had people who were in an interview getting positive or negative feedback about themselves.

They'd taken a personality test and the interviewer was either telling them good things about themselves or bad things about themselves.

And what they manipulated was how much eye contact did the interviewer use?

Oh, God.

And it turned out that if the interviewer was using a lot of eye contact and telling you good things about yourself, you really liked the interviewer.

If the eye contact was coming from the interviewer who was telling you bad things, you really hated that person more than if they didn't use so much eye contact.

So your listener is right in saying that eye contact automatically makes you feel something and too much of it

or too little of it can be disturbing.

Now, the other person you mentioned who said she's a flirt and she can maintain eye contact, does that make her creepy?

The fact that she can do it doesn't make her creepy.

But whether she does it or not and when she does it.

But the fact that she's female, I think, helps a lot.

We were already talking about males being more threatening and creepier.

Women really have to work at it to come across as creepy because they're not threatening, usually.

Yeah, I think there's some posing that goes on.

What you're trying to do is show that you're not tied down by convention and

You're not a conformist.

You want to look like all the other goths, right?

Yep, exactly.