Gaze Avoidance and Baby-Gazing

Sorry, there is no abstract. Read the first few lines of the text instead! As long ago as 1872 Darwin [1] noted that gaze avoidance was one of the signs of shame. Recently is has been described in connection with personality variables [2, 3] and social interaction [4-6]. In the Japanese literature the neurotic disorder 'taijin kyofu' is described [4, 7]. This involves the fear that the expression of one's face could give offence to others. The extent of gaze avoidance has been studied in various psychiatric disorders [8-10], yet we were not able to access papers about the symptom itself as a persistent psychopathological phenomenon. We present 3 patients with this problem as a salient symptom. Two of them were admitted with their babies to mother and baby units in Manchester and Birmingham, and it was interesting to observe its effect on the mother-infant interaction. One patient also showed the unusual and paradoxical behaviour of baby-gazing, about which we have only been able to find one paper [11].