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Provision exists in the Argyle & Dean (1965) ‘affiliative conflict’ theory for testing a hypothesis that the frequency of gaze aversion in a dyadic encounter will increase as the anxiety of one or both of the participants increases. While these and other researchers have implied this to be the case, no systematic study of the phenomenon appears to have been undertaken. Two studies respectively involving transient and predispositional anxiety were carried out, but in neither did the results support this hypothesis.
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Hobson et al. (1973) studied this question.
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