The look is the window where the soul and the heart coincide

Our eyes do not lie: they are the mirror of the soul, the true face of all the possible faces that we are capable of putting in each situation.. Therefore, the best way to start getting to know a person is to look into their eyes and observe the indications they give us about their emotional state, about what they are feeling at all times.

Our eyes, like our gestures, reveal us to others and they say more about ourselves than any of our words. In fact, non-verbal language can begin with a look and end in all our movements, constituting most of the information we can transmit.

The mirror of the soul: another way of looking at ourselves

Many studies reveal to us that, When we meet a person, our eyes can transmit a wide range of sensations to us.: distrust or trust, security, well-being, fear… We know that this is true because it has happened to us in our daily lives: it is as if we were able to go beyond the filter that the body represents and reach the souls of others through their eyes.

Some experts, in whose work they have to be in contact with the study of people’s faces, have observed that the eyes are the mirror of the soul because they are the most sincere part of the face. We have no control over the eyes, unlike, for example, the mouth. If we like something, our pupils dilate involuntarily and give us away, or they contract as a sign of rejection, for example.

The body language of our eyes

According to a study, Human beings interpret the emotions of others by analyzing the expression in their eyes. It is believed that this strategy began as a universal adaptive response to environmental stimuli and evolved into a mechanism that communicates our deepest emotional states.

In this research, participants continually linked squinting, which improves our visual discrimination by blocking light and sharpening focus, with related emotions such as disgust and suspicion. In contrast, open eyes, which expand our field of vision, were associated with emotions related to sensitivity, such as fear and amazement.

“When looking at the face, the eyes dominate emotional communication,” said Anderson, one of the researchers. «The eyes are windows to the soul probably because they are the first conduits for sight. “Expressive emotional changes around the eye influence how we see and, in turn, this communicates to others how we think and feel.”

Among all the information that we can receive through our eyes, we could make a small list that you will surely find curious to say the least. Let’s see below why we say that the look is the mirror of the soul:

Happiness

When our eyes narrow, wrinkle, and shine more than normal, we probably feel good. It is not necessary to see a person smile to realize that they are happy thanks to their gaze.

Attention

If what we have before us are open eyes and a look that is penetrating, it means that the person is attentive. to what we say or to anything else he is doing. If he is talking to us, he is paying attention to our words and we would have to look at other non-verbal traits to intuit whether he judges them for better or worse.

Sadness

If the eyes are the mirror of the soul, with them we can intuit this emotion, which is one of the ones we feel the most and that we often try to hide. In this case, the eyelids are raised and the lower edge of the eyebrows is raised.

Anger

When we get angry, our eyes or those of others see our eyebrows arch. and the expression is totally serious. Sometimes we even frown.

Uncertainty or evaluation

The moment we listen to someone and narrow our eyes we are indicating that either we evaluate what they say and doubt its veracity, for example, or we are not fully understanding what they are telling us. Squinting can also indicate tiredness.

Sexual desire or cognitive effort

When we feel sexual desire or make some cognitive effort, the pupils dilate, as we have said in previous lines, and they leave us completely exposed to the other person. We cannot avoid it, to the point that it is usually accompanied by rubbing our eyes because they become moist and we feel uncomfortable.

Regarding cognition, research analyzed changes in pupil size during encoding and retrieval of a list of words. What the researchers found was the pupil was more constricted in the initial fixation phase and gradually more dilated throughout the subsequent encoding, distraction, and recall phases of the task, as the words were held in memory.

Another interesting result of this study was that the pupillary response was different for those words that were successfully encoded and remembered compared to those that were forgotten: the pupil was more constricted before and more dilated after the onset of word presentation.

The “social face”

As we have seen so far, the expression The eyes are the mirror of the soul It has a verifiable basis. However, it goes much further. Under the study of psychologists and scientists from different branches of human language, throughout our growth, until we reach approximately 40 years of age, We choose a series of faces that we adapt to very different and specific communicative situations.

This is what has been called social face: It is very significant, for example, how in sad moments when we want to laugh, our expression remains composed. Teresa Baró, in this regard, affirms that we are not liars, since Living in society requires certain patterns of behavior that we must maintain as a means of survival.

We are not liars because we cannot be, we can adjust our facial expressions and even our gaze movements voluntarily, but We can never prevent our eyes from being the reflection of what we feel, the mirror of the soul.

To conclude, the eyes are a way to understand the human mind. Studying them allows us to take advantage of the fact that the eye is an extension of our brain, of our soul. Thanks to them we can know emotional states and glimpse, to a certain extent, the intentions that others have.

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