How are the eyes the mirror of the soul?

Yes, actually, that’s something that scientists study on a fairly regular basis. Then they test people to see if they’re able to accurately choose the emotion of the person photographed. Some people are good at it, others not so much. I’ve taken part in studies that are looking to see how good people in general are at determining emotion.

I think a lot of it boils down to how much attention the observer pays to people on a regular basis. Emotions do show, and the skin around the eyes bunches and crinkles in different ways depending on what someone is feeling.

I photograph thirty people each week. Have done this for forty years. I teach facial expressions to actors.

There are many nuances. But the biggest indicator of “eyes mirroring the soul” is their level of contact.

Two kinds of people have difficulty keeping eye contact.
1 – Insecure avoidant people.
2 – Secure people who talk beyond their expertise.

Two kinds of people have great eye contact.
1 – Anyone allowed to speak on subjects they are expert in.
2 – Secure people engaging in small talk about nothing at all.

Basically, eye contact is a bullshit meter.
_________

BTW… I think the phrase is something more akin to eyes are the windows of the soul, rather than mirroring the soul. But I think you mean the same thing.

Also the phrase, the apple of my eye… I believe refers to being so emotionally close and secure to someone that eye contact is strong enough and close enough to see your own reflection in the eyes of another… and thereby seeing yourself in them. Seeing yourself in another person is the highest empathy.

I attended a ninja school for a while. They practice that sort of thing. For instance if you imagine a boxer in the usual boxer pose, that is exactly the way a fearful person looks, except he has fear in his face. Face, not eyes.

Poker players do the same thing: they sit in front of a mirror and practice looking scared. In poker that is called a “tell”, and a fake tell is a very valuable trick. But it’s the face, not the eyes.

There is one case where the eyes send a clear message. If a girl looks across a crowded dance floor at a boy and thinks “Ask me to dance,” her pupils will get larger. A boy can see this even though the light in a dance hall is normally dim.

To be realistic, when talking about eyes we should only consider the eye balls. Eye lids, eye brows, and skin around the eyes are actually part of and governed by facial expression and as well as separate anatomies from eye balls. The only emotion that can possibly be predicted from eye balls observation are changes in diameter and shape of pupils. This will limit the prediction to fear, feeling of sexual sexual arousals, attraction, etc (under normal brightness in environment). It’s simply metaphorical, fallacious, and an exaggeratrion to say that eyes are the mirror of the soul.

Poetic bogosity. I think the idea of knowing a person through his/her eyes is crazy – the viewer is imputing the viewer’s own interpretation onto the person with the eyes and acting from there.

SO much nuance in the eyes, some of which we only notice subconsciously. For example, when a person sees something they like, or are attracted to (especially another person) their pupils dilate. If the subject of this attraction is looking at them, they react without even knowing why.
The first time I looked deep into my now-husband’s eyes, I was really angry with him. I had known him about 2 months. One afternoon I tracked him down to the small engine shop where he worked, leaned across the counter and looked him dead in the eye to tell him he was an asshole and I wasn’t going to play his games and I never wanted to see him again…but stopped cold. It was like I could see the universe racing in his eyes. Logically I knew I was just seeing the rapid expansion of his pupils and the contraction of the iris and the reactions of all the little gold flecks that looked like shooting stars….but it was mesmerizing. All I could manage was a meek “Go to hell,” before I turned on my heel and walked out, wondering what had just hit me.
So then I married him.

Haha @Dutchess_III. Funny.

It took 4 more years of me telling him to go to hell until I finally relented, in 2002, and we’ve been together since. He’s a hell of a salesman and he just does not give up!. He still pisses me off! I just don’t look in his eyes anymore.

Someone looked into my eyes once and when I looked back his were like clotted spiders’ web. That’s the best way I can describe them, very cold and hostile in an ineffective way.

Like…was he high? On pot? Or both of you high?

It was an intense moment but we weren’t high.

Were you about to fight?

No there was no fight just a strong sense of ill will.

Thanks for all the answers.

@Drastic
the skin around the eyes bunches and crinkles in different ways depending on what someone is feeling Sure, but I’m interested in the information carried by the eyes themselves. I agree that we might THINK that somebody’s eyes say something but in fact, we’re actually reading the skin around them.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies the biggest indicator of “eyes mirroring the soul” is their level of contact. Excellent point. More generally, what the eyes are looking at, their movements, their degree of focus is informative too. E.g. “an empty gaze” when a person is not actually looking at anything but lost in her thoughts.

@UM The only emotion that can possibly be predicted from eye balls observation are changes in diameter and shape of pupils. This will limit the prediction to fear, feeling of sexual sexual arousals, attraction, etc (under normal brightness in environment). I agree it’s only a meyaphor or an exageration, but I also agree with Duchess that a lot of nuances can be fathomed by looking people in the eyes, and trying to undetstand how. There could be other indicators we’re not aware of. The veins in the white of the eyes may indicate anger. The two pupils could have different dilatation…

@elbanditoroso You must not look people in the eyes very often.

Following the leads offered by responses here, i have been reading about the scientific basis for the idea that the eyes are the windows or mirrors of our “souls. Here are my conclusions so far, if anyone is interested.

Most of the literature focusses on pupil dilatation. Here is a good summary on it.

Beyond adjustment to ligt intensity (it’s primary function), pupil size has been linked to a wide varieties of mental states: sexual arousal, fear, concentration, sleepiness, introversion, depression, etc. Sexual arousal has been the most studied but by far not the only factor at play.

E.g. pupil size increases in proportion to the difficulty of a task at hand. Calculate nine times 13 and your pupils will dilate slightly. Try 29 times 13 and they will widen further and remain dilated until you reach the answer or stop trying.

Pupil dilation can also betray an individual’s decision, concluded a 2010 study led by Wolfgang Einhäuser-Treyer, from Philipps University Marburg in Germany. Participants were told to press a button at any point during a 10-second interval, and their pupil sizes correlated with the timing of their decisions. Dilation began about one second before they pressed the button and peaked one to two seconds after.

Scientists don’t know why our eyes behave this way and there’s apparently no way to guess scientifically whether an individual’s pupil dilatation is due to sexual arousal, interest, concentration, fear, decision making, or any of the multiple mental events that have been linked to pupil dilatation in separate studies. Which does not mean that it’s undoable, only that we don’t know how to do it yet.

Oddly, pupil dilatation and constriction are controlled by two distinct nervous systems: the so-called “sympathetic system”, known for triggering “fight or flight” responses, induces pupil dilation, whereas the “parasympathetic system”, known for “rest and digest” functions, causes constriction. Both systems function unconsciously, meaning you can’t decide to open or close your pupils.

Finally, a 2007 study from a certain Matt Larsson from the Örebro university (Sweden) showed that personality traits such as aggressiveness or empathetic-ness correlate with the crypts and furrows of their iris. Iris crypts and furrows are “grooves” in the outer surface of the iris, one of the reasons why iris colors are striated, and apparently linked to the iris muscles that shrink or dilate the pupil.

They are visible upclose, as in Dutchess’ story on this thread, and fairly stable. They are used in biometric iris recognition for that reason. See this picture

The study is silent on whether emotional changes can be correlated with changes in color patterns in the iris, but i suppose that would make sense.

@olivier5 “i have been reading about the scientific basis for the idea that the eyes are the windows or mirrors of our “souls.”

It is not a scientific idea. It is a poetic idea.

The “soul” is not a real thing. It’s imaginary, so it can only be poetic.

Wait….I accept the ideas that @olivier5 posted about the scientific nature of the eyes reacting in certain ways when we have certain emotions. So it isn’t our “soul” that’s being seen, it’s our emotions.

Yes, i am looking for the scientific basis for the idea that one can read people’s emotions or thoughts in their eye. The “soul” thing is just a traditional (and yes, poetic) way to express the idea. I thought it was pretty obvious that the word “soul” was not to be taken literally in this context…

Some do take it literally, @olivier5.

I’ll do some googling.

One

Two

Three

Soul is a Hebrew concept, a synonym for a living breathing creature. When the creature stops breathing, the soul is dead. Anybody who uses the word in any other context either doesn’t know what they are talking about, or is trying to sell something you don’t need. Except musicians. Musicians are cool, and they know exactly what they mean by “soul”.

^ Thanks for the lecture. I was just quoting a welk-known expression though… It was not to be taken literally. The idea is that people’s eyes give away clues about what they think. Is that idea clear enough for you or do I need to say it in Hebrew? :-)

Maybe this will help:
לתת רמזים על מה שהם חושבים .הרעיון הוא כי העיניים של האנשים.

Ha ha ha. Thanks, that clarifies.

:D.

@olivier5 I hope I have not caused offense. I spend a lot of effort to be sure I know what words mean and I wanted to share the results.

No offense taken, Smart.

IMO, words mean what we agree they mean. They are curency of exhange, and have no absolute value. Rather, their meaning depend on the context.

^^^ and that’s a slippery slope!

^^ I agree, and it’s important to remind ourselves of the core / traditional meanings of words, as SmartAZ just did, in order to better anchor and explain more modern, figurative or poetic meanings. E.g. in this case, SmartAZ’s linking of the word “soul” to “life” help understand the meaning of the word as it should be understood in the context of this thread, i.e. “mental life”. Something that flickers and changes all the time, and yes, something that can die.

Maybe that’s why we close the eyes of dead people: there’s no life to reflect, their “window” only opens up to nothing.

What I objecyed to was the idea that there’s only one correct meaning, that words should always be used literally. That would make human language as poor and unweildy as machine language.

But you also have to be aware of what the majority considers the correct meaning. If you are using it in a way that most people don’t use it, you have to clarify that.

I, and everyone I know, use the word “soul” to mean some entity that grows inside of you, or gets stuffed in you in the womb, and continues to exist after life. I wish. It would be nice. But no cigar. :(

I was reading a short book, set in the jungles of India. There was a blind child in the village. He was born with sight, but everyone knew that when he was 3 the child was blind because of the curse of a drunk wanderer, and the cry of some bird the next day. Then, on the heels of that, a storm came and crashed a big tree on the child’s hut, and his mother died in front of his eyes. So then he was blind.

The main character, an American, says “Do you really believe that the curses of a drunken tramp and the call of a bird caused the boy’s blindness?”
The response was, “So you believe that a child was born of a virgin. You know this to be true. You cannont explain it or really understand it. Why then, must I explain to you that which I know to be true, but which I cannot really understand?”

That’s kind of off the subject, but I just read it today, and marked it, and this seems as good a place as any to throw it out there!

I clarified the meaning of the question in the opening post. It’s always been about emotions, right from the start.

I know you did. And I agree with you. I was just responding to @SmartAZ‘s comment about the reference to the soul as being “poetry,” not science. I responded to him and then went back and read your details, and agreed with you.. My bad for doing it backwards.

@Dutchess_III Indeed, you understood the issue and I liked you story about your husband. That was a perfect example of what i wanted to discuss. I also appreciate the three links you offered, in particular the one stressing the need to establish a baseline: we can “read” the body language of the people we know well much better than that of the people we don’t know well.

Oh, yeah. I mean, if you know someone well, you can recognize them from behind, without even seeing their face, just by the way the walk and carry themselves.