Eye Contact in Porn: Multifaceted Responses to Direct Gaze in Brief Sexually Explicit Videos Among Heterosexual Cisgender Men.

In pornography created for (and often by) heterosexual men, it is common for women performers to look directly at the camera. This simulates eye contact with viewers and is intended to create a participatory point of view. Little is known about the function of direct gaze in this context. In other domains, eye contact can increase physiological arousal, but also facilitate nurturant connection. Eye contact in porn may thus have a range of functions, which we explored in a preregistered study. Participants (<italic>N</italic> = 799) watched a brief sexually explicit video that had a high prevalence of eye contact (<italic>n</italic> = 399) or no eye contact (<italic>n</italic> = 400), then completed measures of eroticism, nurturance, guilt, other measures of affect and desire, participatory perspective, and whom they experienced sexual desire for. We found no significant differences in eroticism, nurturance, guilt, or other affect or desire measures across conditions, but found some evidence that eye contact <italic>may</italic> facilitate a participatory (vs. observational) perspective and desire for the performer in the film (e.g. vs. someone else), .05 < <italic>p</italic>s < .10. Overall, our findings provide preliminary insight into the function of eye contact in pornography and provide promising avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]