If you're on a first date with someone and you're having trouble reading the situation, researchers from the University of Chicago might be able to help you find answers. They identified eye patterns that suggest whether someone is thinking about romance or feeling sexual desire.
Lead author Stephanie Cacioppo, with researchers from the University of Chicago's departments of Psychiatry and Psychology as well as the University of Geneva, conducted a study to help read people's eye movements, specifically to determine cues for love and lust. They conducted two experiments to find their answers.
In the first experiment, male and female students from the University of Geneva were assigned to look at a series of black-and-white photographs of people they had never met. The people in the pictures were young, adult heterosexual couples who were looking at or interacting with one another. Then for the second experiment, the same students were presented with photographs of attractive individuals of the opposite sex who were looking directly into the camera.
For both experiments, the participants were presented these photographs from a computer and were asked to decide as quickly as possible if they believed the people in each photograph were displaying feelings of sexual desire or romance. According to the researchers, the experiments revealed that if a person is concentrating on someone else's face then it is believed they are pondering about romance. In contrast, if the person was gazing at someone else's body, it revealed feelings of sexual desire.
"Although little is currently known about the science of love at first sight or how people fall in love, these patterns of response provide the first clues regarding how automatic attentional processes, such as eye gaze, may differentiate feelings of love from feelings of desire toward strangers," said Cacioppo, in this University of Chicago news release.
In analyzing the eye-tracking data of the participants, the researchers found that if a photograph was labeled as 'romantic' then the respondent was visually fixated on the face of the person in the photograph. But if the photograph elicited feelings of sexual desire, the respondent's eyes moved away from the face and concentrated on the rest of body. The findings were consistent for both male and female respondents.
The study, "Love Is in the Gaze: An Eye-Tracking Study of Love and Sexual Desire," was published in the journal Psychological Science on Wednesday. You can read more about the findings in this Science Codex article.
