How To Read Someone’s Emotions In Their Eyes

Reading someone’s emotions in their eyes is something we can all do. After all, the gaze is the part of the human being that communicates the most, the one that transmits the most and with which we connect most intensely. Understanding all those non-verbal clues inscribed in the eyes of others will allow us to intuit, for example, falsehood, sincerity or the magic of attraction.

Bécquer said that whoever can speak with their eyes can even kiss with their eyes. Such is the magnetism of these fascinating organs that sometimes we are not fully aware of all the secrets they hide. Thus, something that communication experts know well is that, although many of our behaviors, actions and words can be filtered by social conditioning and by our will, the gaze expresses a type of language that we cannot always control.

If someone attracts us, the pupil dilates. The gaze also widens when we are surprised, it goes in one direction when we try to remember something, or it goes down when we are suspended in a state of introspection. There are so many and so subtle nuances that characterize the behavior of our eyes that it is always interesting to learn more about it. In this way, we can go deep into the minds of others or read their emotions in an effective way.

How to read the emotions in the eyes

Let’s think about something for a moment. If there is something we spend a good part of our time doing, it is communicating with other people. We do it (almost) always face to face, looking for the other’s eye contact, however, we pay greater attention to the oral message, to the word, to the quality of the dialogue.

It should also be said that in recent years, with the arrival of new technologies and instant messaging systems, the style of communication has changed. We no longer need to have anyone before us to say something to him; now, we can even convey our joy, love or anger through an emoticon. All this is neither good nor bad, it is just different and above all, faster.

However, with this we lose the power to read the emotions of others in their eyes. We deprive ourselves of that pleasure, of that mystery that is to reveal through tiny gestures and magical nuances the quality or complexity of our relationships. Let’s see now how to carry out this reading, this analysis …

The blinks

When we speak of the language of the eyes we are not referring only to the eyeball and the pupil. The great expressive power of our gaze is orchestrated above all by a very complex network of nerves and muscles that intervene in the movement of the eyebrows, eyelids, temples, etc.

• All this reflects the emotional activation of each moment, where the blinks also fulfill their function. For example, it is known that when something surprises us, outrages us or even angers us, we tend to blink much more.
• Likewise, it is also common to blink a lot when we interact with someone we like or when we are thinking about many things at the same time.

All this may seem contradictory to us, but it is convenient to know that this act, that of blinking more intensely than normal, is a mechanism that starts the brain when you feel more nervous than usual. Therefore, if we want to read the emotions of others through their eyes, it is important to focus on the context or the conversation that we have at that moment.

The language of the pupils

Our pupils dilate when we see something stimulating or we have little light.  If something or someone attracts us, it is common for the pupil to flood like a full moon, immense and illuminated by that emotion, by that power of attraction. However, when we feel offended or see something that makes us angry or upset, the pupil contracts.

Visual synchrony

Reading the emotions of the people we like is something that we would all like to be able to master. However, sometimes it is not necessary to be an expert in non-verbal language to perceive the harmony that at any given moment, we can establish with a friend, the person who attracts us or even with a family member.

A curious fact that the experts explain to us on this subject is that when two people “connect” a visual synchrony is also established, that is, the visual gestures are mimicked and the same micro-expressions are set in motion …

Sideways glances: shy and liars

We have all experienced it at some time, either when we speak with a child or with a very insecure person . Instead of maintaining direct eye contact, they escape through the sides, in those corners where they do not meet our face, in those spaces where they attend us only from the side, where they hide their extreme shyness …

Now, it is remarkable to note that the liar personality also has elusive eyes. It is not something as evident as when we are with a shy profile or with social anxiety, and therefore, we must pay the utmost attention when reading their emotions and intentions.

To conclude, as we have been able to deduce, the eyes, the looks, transmit a remarkable and wide variety of social and emotional information that sometimes escapes us and that is always easy for us to interpret. At our fingertips we have, for example, interesting studies and works such as “Effects of the gaze on the perception of emotion” by the psychologist Reginald B. Adams or “Morphology and psychology of the human eye” by Hisashi Kobayashi, which will allow us to delve much more about the topic.

Its worth doing.