In his dictionary of dark emotions, Jhon Koenig names a complex emotion, that’s what it feels like when you meet someone on the street and look them in the eye for a few seconds, it looks like he’s spying on us or that we’re spying on each other through a small hole in the wall, which makes us vulnerable. Emotion now has a name: opia. Because it’s not the eyes that radiate beauty, it’s the looks.
When you travel by bus, sit in a restaurant or walk around your city, meet very different people, and sometimes exchange glances, without even realizing it, the looks say a lot about us, betray us when we are sad, bored, in love, worried or tired.
- If we sit in front of a person.
- Ask them how they feel and smile at us.
- Maybe if we look them in the eye we can see that that smile is not real.
- That it does not follow what the person really feels.
- Looks are part of nonverbal communication and teach us a lot about others.
Eye movements have been studied by Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), which has called this visual language “eye access keys”. Bandler and Gringer, founders of NLP, have seen numerous videos to decipher the meaning of eye movements. conclusion: depending on the type of eye movement, people can use different parts of the brain and different senses, so we can talk about four different treatment systems:
But not everyone works like this, and sometimes they even combine different treatment systems, so you have to be careful when it comes to generalizing. To know how a person works, we can ask simple questions, such as, “How do you imagine your work in the future?”This way, we’ll see how to react to visual creations and have a starting point for interpreting their ways of looking.
A look can be interpreted in many ways, but it can also convey many feelings and emotions. Psychology Today published an article in 2014 in which it presents the conclusions reached on the power of the eyes. The conclusions are summarized in five sections:
If we look into someone else’s eyes we generate a sense of excitement, although the interpretation of the gaze depends on the context in which we find ourselves, if someone we do not know looks at us for a long time, we can interpret that as a threat or a danger and be afraid, however, if it is someone we know or love, an intense look can provoke sexual arousal.
To distinguish whether a smile is sincere or not, psychologist Paul Ekman says you have to look at it, if a smile is honest and sincere, your eyes narrow and create small wrinkles in the corner, called crow’s feet.
If a person is interested, his pupils expand and this dilation makes us attractive, in this sense a study was carried out in which the researchers showed two photos of a woman, and in one of them artificially altered the size of the pupil. The result was that the participants found the woman in the photo more attractive with the older students.
Research has observed that intense mutual eye contact is a sign of mutual interest. This sustained look between two people who already know each other shows admiration and love.
We’ve always thought that people who lie tend to look away, but in reality a liar puts all his energy into making the interlocutor believe, so he looks us more closely, on the contrary, the one who tells the truth doesn’t need to try anything, so that he can get distracted and look away instead of looking into his interlocutor’s eyes.