Our emotional responses to certain situations govern how our eyes gather and focus light to detect an unknown threat, according to Cornell University neuroscientists.
Have you ever wondered why our eyes widen when we're afraid and squint when we're disgusted? Cornell University neuroscientists find that our emotional responses to certain situations have a lot to do with this. Our eyes gather and focus light on objects according to how we feel about that particular object.
Our eyes widen in fear, boosting sensitivity and expanding our field of vision to locate surrounding danger. When disgusted, our eyes narrow, blocking light to sharpen focus and pinpoint the source of our disgust.
"These opposing functions of eye widening and narrowing, which mirror that of pupil dilation and constriction might be the primitive origins for the expressive capacity of the face," study author Adam Anderson said in a press statement. "And these actions are not likely restricted to disgust and fear, as we know that these movements play a large part in how perhaps all expressions differ, including surprise, anger and even happiness."
Findings of this study suggest that human facial expressions arose from universal, adaptive reactions to environmental stimuli and not originally as social communication signals. A similar theory was proposed by Charles Darwin who said that emotional expressions originated as opposing functional adaptations for the expresser, not as distinct categories of social signals
Researchers also found that emotions filter our reality, shaping what we see before light ever reaches the inner eye.
"We tend to think of perception as something that happens after an image is received by the brain, but in fact emotions influence vision at the very earliest moments of visual encoding," Anderson said.
Now that it has been determined that emotional response is responsible for many facial and eye expressions, researcher plan on conducting further studies to understand how these eye expressions came to be used as a means of communication. Many previous studies have found that the eyes can give away information about what a person is thinking or how he is feeling, though not much is known about the mechanism behind this.
"We are seeking to understand how these expressions have come to communicate emotions to others," Anderson said. "We know that the eyes can be a powerful basis for reading what people are thinking and feeling, and we might have a partial answer to why that is."
The new study was published in the March 2014 issue of Psychological Science.
