Your eye movement when you look at your date can tell whether you have love or lust on your mind, a new study finds.
How right Bryan Adams was when he sang "Look in to my eyes and you will see, what you mean to me." In a new study, University of Chicago researchers found that the difference between love and lust clearly reflects in the eyes.
For the study, a group of male and female students from the University of Geneva were given a series of black-and-white photographs of persons they had never met. In the first part of the study, these pictures were of young, adult heterosexual couples who were looking at or interacting with each other. In the second part of the study, the pictures were attractive individuals of the opposite sex, looking directly at the camera/viewer. None of the photos were erotic or containing any nudity.
The study participants were asked to identify whether the people in the pictures had love or lust on their minds. The findings of the study showed that eye patterns concentrate on a stranger's face if the viewer sees that person as a potential partner in romantic love, but the viewer gazes more at the other person's body if he or she is feeling sexual desire. That automatic judgment can occur in as little as half a second, producing different gaze patterns.
"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," noted lead author Stephanie Cacioppo in a press statement.
"By identifying eye patterns that are specific to love-related stimuli, the study may contribute to the development of a biomarker that differentiates feelings of romantic love versus sexual desire," said co-author John Cacioppo. "An eye-tracking paradigm may eventually offer a new avenue of diagnosis in clinicians' daily practice or for routine clinical exams in psychiatry and/or couple therapy."
In a 2012 study, researchers from Concordia University in Montreal found that falling in love or lust actually depends on which part of the brain is activated when you get such feelings.
Two parts of the brain, the insula and the striatum, are responsible for tracking the way in which sexual desire develops into feelings of love, researchers said. Lust triggers parts of the brain that control pleasurable feelings, associated with sex and food, but love triggers parts of the brain associated with habits.
Another Google study conducted in the same year found that feelings of love and lust are seasonal and highly influenced by cultural holidays and other biological factor. Earlier this year, another study by researchers from the University of Chicago found that different networks of brain regions are activated by love and sexual desire and that a region deep inside the brain controls how quickly people make decisions about love.
The current study was published online in the journal Psychological Science.
