Maintaining eye contact has always been an issue for a lot of people. A sense of fear grips their hearts when someone looks them in the eye. What charismatic people do differently is that they look at someone straight in the eyes to form a connection while interacting with them. "Eyes are the windows to the soul". Maintaining eye contact involves allowing someone to have a brief peek into our heads, and this freaks the hell out of us. Our face reveals information like an open book, and our eyes act as an index. Eyes are used heavily in communication. It speaks volumes to the other person about your interest in keeping the conversation alive. And since humans are social creatures, communication plays a huge factor in our lives.
One of the greatest examples of charismatic personalities is that of Bill Clinton, America's 42nd president. Bill Clinton was known for the impression he left on the people he interacted with. If you look closely, you will notice how he tends to pour all his attention onto just one person at a time. He does this through his impeccable eye contact. When he is interacting with a crowd, he gives individual eye contact with the members of the audience, making them feel that they are having a one-on-one conversation with him. And of course, he isn't staring down at them. He maintains eye contact for the right amount of time, with a soft look on his face. When he shakes hands with people, he looks at them in the eye while giving a firm handshake, and before he shakes the next person's hand, he connects eyes with the previous person for one last time, like a seal on the deal, and then repeats the same process with the next person,
Happiness, sadness, fear, hatred, surprise among all the other permutations and combinations of these emotions can be felt through the eyes, to be specific, through the muscles around the eyes. And so when you make eye contact with someone, you are temporarily giving them access to your emotional world. We consider our emotions to be something very personal, and yet we have developed a sort of Wi-fi that spreads this personal information as a broadcast. Why would evolution do this to us? Our ancestors depended heavily on body language, especially while hunting. Speaking takes more time for communication, whereas reading body language consumes a fraction of a second. And this information was very crucial in life-or-death situations. If one person sees a threat, everyone in the group would understand it immediately when they see that person's facial expression.
Eyelids have four muscles on each side of the face. This helps in changing the aperture when we need to shift our focus. These are the same muscles that project the information about our emotional state. The iris (coloured part of the eye) is attached to the sclera (white part of the eye). This helps us subconsciously detect even the slightest movement in the eye. When we feel fear, anger, surprise, our sclera is exposed greatly as our upper eyelids are raised. When someone is happy, you can almost see lustre in their eyes. And I am not talking about the colour of the eye. It's like a glow that makes them look as if they were lit up. Sad people have eyes like black holes, which sucks up all the light in their eyes and their whites look off-white, which makes them look dead. Similarly, all of one's emotions tend to show up on their face through such 'micro-expressions.
What helps us pick up these minute signals are called mirror neurons. These neurons in our brain pick up even the smallest of details of the body language, and it all happens unconsciously. These are the same neurons that help us 'mirror' emotions of another person, thus causing it to spread. And now you know why our mood becomes lighter when we spend time with happy people. And hence selecting the right set of friends can help you mirror the right set of emotions which ultimately decides your personality.
According to Darwin, some of the expressions and movements of the body arise as an instinctual response of strong emotion. It usually helps relieve the feeling or help us prepare for actions that are likely to occur concerning our emotions. For instance, when we feel confident, resolute, determined, decisive, prepared, etc., our chest, knuckles and elbows puff out, our shoulders are down, and we stand tall with a strong look. If we feel underconfident, our balance will be off, our arms and fists turn inward and our body looks shrugged. When we feel helpless and in doubt, our shoulders are raised, our elbows face inward, our palms face upward, our eyes are wide open and our jaw muscles relax such that it drops. Still, there are times when even confident people show body language which screams the complete opposite of what they actually are. This can be fixed once we start consciously realizing what we are doing under pressure, at times when confidence is supposed to be shown.
Eye contact is not always a pleasant feeling. This happens when the eye contact is not mutual. When the intentions behind the eye contact are wretched, the person receiving the connection will obviously feel horrible. Women are especially prone to such evil eyes from uncouth men. The feeling is described to be similar to when someone is being groped through the eyes. To have good eye contact, we must differentiate between eye groping and eye dancing. Eye dancing involves two people on the same energy level, whereas eye groping is one-directional. Eye dancing involves locking eyes and sharing emotions, whereas eye groping is just throwing emotions at someone. Eye dancing is enjoyable for both parties, whereas eye groping is very uncomfortable at the receiving end. Eye contact is a shared experience.
To read further in detail, you can refer to the following book. There are a lot of examples and interviews given in the book which can help you understand the crux in a much simpler way.
- The power of eye contact ( By Michael Ellsberg)
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