The Language of Your Eyes
Your verbal communication covers only a small part of what you actually express. Furthermore, your words are usually filtered by social conditioning or circumstances. That’s why you don’t always say what you genuinely want to. Nevertheless, with your eyes, it’s different. Indeed, they’re not called the windows of your soul for nothing.
The language of your eyes is basically unconscious. In fact, you can’t really constantly maintain control over the way you look at others. Nor can you direct how wide your eyes open, or the degree of moisture in them. However, within these tiny details, there’s a great deal of information contained about what’s really going on in your head.
“The tongue may hide the truth but the eyes – never!”
-Mikhael Bulgakov-
Your pupils have their own alphabet
Your pupils send extremely subtle messages which generally go unnoticed. However, they have their own alphabet that can be deciphered. The most visible aspect is their size, which changes automatically according to various circumstances. You have no control over this.
Normally, your pupils dilate if you find yourself in front of an object that you find pleasing and that you accept without hesitation. Obviously, they also get bigger if the light is poor or you have difficulty visualizing something. Nonetheless, if lighting and visibility conditions are normal, pupil dilation is always a sign of liking and attraction.
The same thing happens the other way around. Indeed, when you’re faced with something that you fear or reject, your pupils tend to contract. Small pupils reveal hostility or moodiness, even if you’re not looking directly at the object that’s making you feel that way.
The language of the eyes has probably been known intuitively for hundreds of years. As a matter of fact, ancient Chinese and Egyptian prostitutes used belladonna in their eyes to increase the size of their pupils when serving one of their clients. They felt that it would make them more desirable.
As for the contracted pupils, it’s easy to observe them in any person who’s ready to attack. In fact, as well as narrowing their eyes, their pupils also decrease in size.
The language of your eyes
Your eyes are permanently moving, even when you’re asleep. As a rule, these are small actions on the eyelids or the eyeball that are quite difficult to capture. Nevertheless, there are more explicit movements that occur in the phase of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when your eyes move faster.
If your eyes move up and tilt to the right, your brain’s memory mechanisms have probably kicked in. This movement means you’re remembering certain information or a past situation. On the other hand, if they move up and to the left, it’s most likely that your creative functions related to your visual field have been activated. This movement usually occurs when you see an image that’s surprising to you.
Directing your eyes downward indicates that you’ve entered a process of introspection. If your gaze is directed to the left, it’s because you’re making a calculation about a situation or a message. If they move to the right, it signifies that your memory process related to physical sensations has been activated.
Your eye movements to the left are the clearest indicator that a creative process is being activated. To the right, they suggest a memory process. In both cases, they allude to experiences related to sound.
These are just a few small examples of the enormous universe of non-verbal communication.
Duchenne smile
All the information that the eyes can provide isn’t only contained in the eyeball, but also in the muscles that surround it. In this case, the orbicularis oculi muscles are the protagonists. These are muscles that are close to the eye and are key to identifying if a smile is genuine.
The French researcher, Guillaume Duchenne realized that a genuine smile is one that involves the zygomaticus major and minor muscles near the mouth and the orbicularis oculi muscles. Thus, the spontaneous smile was baptized as the Duchenne smile. In this case, the orbicularis oculi muscles contract and are responsible for stretching your cheeks and crinkling your eyes.