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It is very likely that when you leave home today you will put on a mask that darkens your mouth. Such coverages can affect our ability to communicate and pose a particular challenge for those who need to see lips to understand speech.
But what about the eyes that are uncovered? Shakespeare said that the eyes were the windows to the soul. I am not sure about “souls”, but it is very clear that the eyes can provide a great deal of information.
That is why poker players sometimes wear dark glasses for fear of revealing a “tell”, a small signal almost imperceptible to other players that they have a good hand or that they are lying. This could be common wisdom, but there is also some science to back it up.
Our emotions are how we understand others and how they understand us. And research has found that it is possible to interpret people’s emotions by analyzing their eyes. In 2017, researchers from Cornell University showed volunteers images of eyes that expressed different emotions: sadness, disgust, anger, joy, surprise or fear.
The participants were able to consistently assess how well the different words describing mental states matched the “expression of the eye.” The researchers concluded that the eyes provide essential interpersonal perception and that different aspects of the eyes (such as how wide they are or how tilted the forehead is) provide information about different mental states.
Neuroscience is interesting here too. We know that human beings are exceptionally sensitive to very small changes in gaze direction. When you try to judge which way someone is looking, it significantly activates their amygdala, a part of the brain that we have long known is associated with emotion. This shows that there is a link between emotion and the eyes on a neurological level.
We know that the amygdala is relevant to everything that has to do with emotion, and is best known for its role in fear and its mediation of the “fight or flight” response. Subsequent research has shown that the amygdala is also active when we are monitoring the scene for events in which a person may be looking in our direction or changing the direction of the gaze.
This could indicate the importance of the eyes in finding a mate, expressing interest in others or, perhaps, conversely, in identifying threats from others. In short, we are programmed to extract information from the eyes, information that can help us evaluate the emotions of those around us and thus allow us to interact more effectively with them.
There is more evidence for the importance of the eyes from neurochemistry. We know that oxytocin, a naturally produced hormone, is important in social interactions and that it can be important in the way we perceive the faces of those around us.
Researchers have found that when images of faces are shown, people receiving oxytocin spend more time staring into the eyes than those receiving a placebo. Since oxytocin is a factor in social interactions, this finding suggests that the eyes are very important in understanding our engagement and interaction with those around us. Those with elevated levels of oxytocin seem to seek their eyes to help them better relate socially to others.
For the dog lovers among us, there is also some research to suggest that when dogs and their owners look into each other’s eyes, oxytocin levels rise in both humans and pets, suggesting a greater social bond. This only appears to occur with domesticated dogs with which a close social bond is important for the owners and their animals, the results are not shown with wolves.
Eye, don’t believe it
However, there are some things that the eyes cannot tell us. There is a rather sticky myth that stems from so-called “neurolinguistic programming” (NLP), the approach often preferred by those who like to claim that psychology can be used to gain an advantage over others.
The theory goes that if someone is looking up and to the right when they are speaking, that somehow indicates that they are lying. But when investigators filmed one group of people telling true and false stories, and then asked another group to try to detect the lies by looking into the eyes of the speakers, they found no evidence of a link between the lie and eye movements. .
If you want to know how someone feels when face coverage is the norm, the eyes may have the answer you are looking for. We can definitely tell if people are smiling by looking into their eyes, and a smile is very important, now more than ever.
Nigel Holt, professor of psychology, University of Aberystwyth. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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