How To Read Emotions In Another Person’s Eyes

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

Bécquer used to say that whoever can speak with his eyes can even kiss with his eyes. The magnetism of these fascinating organs is so great that sometimes we are not fully aware of all the secrets they hide. Thus, one thing that communication specialists know well is that, although many of our behaviors, actions and words can be filtered by social conditioning and our will, the gaze expresses a type of language that we are not always able to control.

If we are attracted to someone, our pupil dilates. This also happens when we are surprised. Furthermore, our gaze is fixed on a point when we try to remember something, or it diminishes when we are suspended in a state of introspection. The nuances that characterize the behavior of our eyes are so many and so subtle that it is always interesting to know more about the subject. In this way, we can delve into the minds of others or read their emotions effectively.

How to read emotions in eyes

Let’s think about this subject for a moment . If there’s one thing we devote a lot of our time to, it’s communicating with other people. We do this (almost) always face to face, seeking eye contact with each other. However, we pay more attention to the oral message, the words and the quality of the dialogue.

It is also worth mentioning 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 be with someone in front of us to say anything to that person. Now we can even convey our joy, our love or our anger through emoticons. All this is neither good nor bad. It’s just different and mostly faster.

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

the blink of an eye

When we talk about the language of the eyes, we are not just referring to the eyeball and pupil. The great expressive power of our gaze is built mainly on an extremely complex network of nerves and muscles that intervene in the movement of the eyebrows, the blinking of the eyes, the movement of the temples, etc.

• All of this reflects the emotional activation of each moment, in which the blinking of the eyes also plays a role. For example, it is known that when something surprises us, makes us angry, or even angry, we tend to blink much more.
• At the same time, it’s also common to blink a lot when we’re interacting with someone we care about or when we’re thinking about a lot of things at the same time.

This may all seem contradictory, but it’s worth knowing that this act of blinking more intensely than usual is a mechanism that puts the brain in motion when we feel more nervous than usual. So if we want to read others’ emotions through their eyes, it’s important to focus on the context or conversation we’re having at that moment.

The language of pupils

Our pupils dilate when we see something stimulating or we are in a low-light environment.  If we feel attracted to something or someone, the pupil fills up like a full moon, huge and illuminated by this emotion, this power of attraction. However, when we feel offended or see something that makes us angry or upset, the pupil contracts.

visual sync

Reading the emotions of people we care about is something everyone would like to be able to master. However, sometimes it is not necessary to be an expert in non-verbal language to realize the harmony we can establish at a given moment with a friend, with the person we are attracted to, or even with a family member.

A curious fact about this theme that specialists explain to us is that when two people “connect”, a visual synchrony is also established, that is, visual gestures mimic each other and the same microexpressions begin to appear.

Sideways glances: shy and liars

Everyone has been through this situation at some point in their lives. Maybe when we talk to a child or someone very insecure. Instead of maintaining direct eye contact, eyes are turned to the sides, in the corners where they don’t meet our face, in those spaces where we are sideways, where shyness takes refuge…

However, it is important to point out that the lying personality also has shy eyes. It’s not as obvious as when we’re dealing with a shy profile or social anxiety. Therefore, we must turn our full attention when reading other people’s emotions and intentions.

To conclude, as we could deduce,  looks convey an important and extremely wide variety of social and emotional information that sometimes escapes us and is not always easy to interpret.