The Power of Eye Contact
Eye contact and eye expressions are arguably one of the strongest and most intimate forms of non-verbal communication through reading a person’s body language during face-to-face interaction. Eye contact can make or break a job interview or presentation, romantic dates, casual conversations and many other situations. It can show whether a person is feeling sad, happy, confident, excited or scared and so on. Experts say it is unclear whether it is a person’s eyeballs directly portraying the look of certain emotions or if it is the muscles surrounding the eyeball that creates the expression. “When we make eye contact with another person, we are in some sense giving that person keys to our emotional world” (Ellsberg 6). Research explains that the most distinct expression is the glistening expression of rage in a person’s eyes. It can cause the eyes to become bright, bloodshot and even protruding from the sockets, which Darwin calls an example of serviceable expression (Ellsberg 15). Serviceable expression is one of the types of principles that Charles Darwin believes is the majority of human body language, the other one being the principle of anti-thesis, which he wrote about in his book The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. Serviceable expression is natural instinct like reaction that the eyes make to a certain situation. For example, if it is bright or someone is having trouble seeing something, they will squint or if a person is surprised their eyes will widen, making their emotions obvious to others. The other principle is the principle of antithesis which is described by the “shrug”. This principle is done voluntarily and used to express opposing attitudes. In chapter one of The Power of Eye Contact by Michael Ellsberg, the author explain how many of his friends had a deep, emotional and almost very personal hatred against Bill Clinton, even though they had all never met him. At an event one night, some of these friends ended up face-to-face