Is it true that looking into each other's eyes for 60 seconds can make people fall in love with each other?

There are often such clips in movies and TV dramas:

The heroine was knocked flying, the heroine slipped, the heroine fell from a great height... At this moment, the hero flew over and caught the heroine. The two looked into each other's eyes and looked at each other affectionately, as if the world was gray and only the person in front of them was shining.

Whenever such a scene appears, the audience is excited. Needless to say, the two people are bound to stage a touching drama of love and hate.

This is not something the screenwriter made up. Research has found that when two people look at each other, their relationship will indeed heat up.

After looking at each other, we become friends?

"Eye contact" is not just a saying, eye contact plays a huge role in social interactions. In fact, just looking at you for a second in a crowd can mean that our relationship is special.

As early as 1989, researchers discovered that the feelings between two strangers quickly heated up after staring at each other.

They divided 96 strangers, both men and women, into 48 pairs and then assigned different tasks to the participants.

After 2 minutes, the researchers measured the participants' feelings under different conditions. The results showed that compared with the other one-way gaze/gazing subjects, the people in the mutual gaze group (you look into my eyes, I look into your eyes) had stronger emotions and liked each other more.

And just looking into each other's eyes, even if the other person is just a portrait hanging on the wall, will cause waves in your brain.

It’s the same Napoleon, but the feeling he gives when he looks at it from the side and when he looks straight at it is very different | François Gerard

But if people are stared at for a long time, it is easy to feel creepy. So how long is appropriate for initial eye contact?

British scientists tried to answer this question by recruiting eight actors and asking them to record a series of videos facing a camera. Then they recruited some participants to watch these videos and evaluate whether the fixation time in the current video was longer or shorter than the most comfortable fixation time.

After collecting answers from 498 participants, scientists found that, on average, the most comfortable first gaze duration was 3.3 seconds, and few people could accept the other person staring at them for more than 9 seconds at the beginning.

How does the eye contact work?

In addition to making people feel closer, looking into each other's eyes has many magical effects, such as:

Psychologists asked 32 men to evaluate photos of the same woman from different angles: one straight on, one sideways.

The results showed that men generally think that photos with direct gaze are more beautiful. Another study found that the longer the gaze between two people lasted, the more attractive they thought the other person was.

Look at me, if you see me, I will... | Titanic

It makes people feel that the other person is more similar to themselves and more trustworthy. Researchers from Fudan University proposed that self-other fusion occurs when people look at faces that are looking directly at them.

They had participants look at photos of people looking straight ahead and sideways (looking left, looking right), and then measured their feelings. They found that participants thought the photos of strangers who were looking straight at them were more like themselves.

This is strange, why do people feel closer after just looking at each other? Researchers have found that this may be related to the physiological changes in our bodies when we look at each other:

Eye contact can promote the secretion of oxytocin and phenylethylamine in the nervous system. Oxytocin is known as the "cuddle hormone", which makes people happier, more caring for others, and more eager for intimate contact. Phenylethylamine is a catalyst for love, which makes people's heartbeat and breathing speed up.

Remember to look into the other person's eyes when you propose! | "Spy Play"

Gazing can also enhance activation of the amygdala, which plays an important role in both face perception and emotion. French scholars used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the differences between people looking at faces looking straight ahead and looking sideways, and found that the amygdala was more activated when looking straight ahead.

Simply put, looking at each other can awaken our emotions. In most cases, these emotions are positive and make people feel comfortable and happy. However, in special circumstances, emotions can be awakened in a different direction - we may experience hallucinations.

Although it’s nice to look at each other, don’t drink too much

Italian scholar Giovanni Caputo found that if people look at each other for 10 minutes under low-light conditions, they are prone to develop symptoms similar to "schizophrenia."

The dim fortune-telling house brings more than just a sense of mystery | ZCOOL Hero

Giovanni recruited 40 participants and divided them into two groups (the staring group and the wall-looking group), with 20 people in each group divided into 10 pairs. Afterwards, both groups were taken to a dimly lit room.

He asked each pair of partners in the staring group to sit on chairs one meter apart, facing each other. After that, the two people needed to stare at each other for 10 minutes. For the wall-looking group, the two people sat side by side on two chairs one meter apart and stared at the wall for 10 minutes.

Compared with the wall-looking group, the gazing group was more likely to have the following feelings: the world seemed to be shrouded in smoke, all objects or people seemed very far away and unclear; people were motionless, like dead or machines; it felt like a long time had passed; the surrounding sounds became stronger or weaker.

The most serious ones even felt that the colors of the world were gradually disappearing. In short, the gazing group felt that they were out of touch with reality.

Not only that, the gaze group was also more likely to see deformed faces:

95% of people saw a black face, 90% saw the face in front of them decomposing, 75% saw a stranger's face, 75% saw a monster, and 50% saw a child...

Overall, participants in the staring group saw a lot of "surreal" things.

This feeling is quite subjective and is closely related to personal personality traits and values. Another study showed that the higher a person's level of spirituality (such as whether they agree that there is a higher "consciousness" or "spiritual" platform connecting everyone), the more likely they are to see strange faces.

This reminds me of the concept of "Oma Time" in Japanese folk culture: the ancient Japanese believed that at dusk when the sky gradually darkened, people would be more likely to encounter monsters such as monsters, and were also more likely to encounter disasters.

In the novel/animation "From the New World", at dusk the town will play music.

Remind children to return home quickly to avoid evil spirits

Could the existence of this folk custom be related to the phenomenon discovered by the Italians?

In the past, science was not yet developed and humans generally had mysterious spiritual ideas. The illusion of mistaking faces mentioned above could not be reasonably explained, combined with the belief in supernatural powers, leaving behind the legend of "the devil's time" in culture and language.

In the 21st century, such "supernatural" things have gradually disappeared, but in another cultural circle at the end of the continent, scientists have discovered that seemingly illusory legends may very well be people's real life experiences. Even very healthy people can easily have hallucinations under certain circumstances.

As time progresses, the mysterious stories disappear

Just like the UFO legend gradually faded after the advent of high-definition mobile phone cameras

This mutual confirmation across time and space may be the charm of science.

References

[1]Binetti, N., Harrison, C., Coutrot, A., Johnston, A., & Mareschal, I. (2016). Pupil preferred dilation as an index of mutual gaze duration. Royal Society Open Science, 3(7), 160086.

[2]Caputo, GB (2015). Dissociation and hallucinations in dyads engaged through interpersonal gazing. Psychiatry Research, 228(3), 659-663.

[3]Caputo, GB (2017). Strange-face illusions during interpersonal-gazing and personality differences of spirituality. Explore, 13(6), 379-385.

[4]Dumas, T., Dubal, S., Attal, Y., Chupin, M., Jouvent, R., Morel, S., & George, N. (2013). MEG evidence for dynamic amygdala modulations by gaze and facial emotions. PloS one, 8(9), e74145.

[5]Ewing, L., Rhodes, G., & Pellicano, E. (2010). Have you got the look? Gaze direction affects judgments of facial attractiveness. Visual Cognition, 18(3), 321-330.

[6]Kellerman, J., Lewis, J., & Laird, JD (1989). Looking and loving: The effects of mutual gaze on feelings of romantic love. Journal of research in personality, 23(2), 145-161.

[7]Lee, DH, & Anderson, AK (2017). Reading what the mind thinks from how the eye sees. Psychological science, 28(4), 494-503.

[8]Shimojo, S., Simion, C., Shimojo, E., & Scheier, C. (2003). Gaze bias both reflects and influences preference. Nature neuroscience, 6(12), 1317-1322.

[9]Zhou, C., Jiang, T., & Zhu, L. (2018). Direct gaze blurs self-other boundaries. The Journal of general psychology, 145(3), 280-295.

Author: Fox Knight

Editor: Emeria, You Shiyou

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