A new study has revealed that eye movement of a person could tell the difference between their romantic love and sexual desire.
Specifically, where your date looks at you could indicate whether love or lust is in the cards. The new study found 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.
Stephanie Cacioppo, director of the UChicago High-Performance Electrical NeuroImaging Laboratory, said that although little is currently known about the science of love at first sight or how people fall in love, but these patterns of response provided the first clues regarding how automatic attention processes, such as eye gaze, might differentiate feelings of love from feelings of desire toward strangers.
He further explained that by identifying eye patterns that were specific to love-related stimuli, the study might contribute to the development of a biomarker that differentiates feelings of romantic love versus sexual desire.
It was also established that an eye-tracking paradigm might eventually offer a new avenue of diagnosis in clinicians' daily practice or for routine clinical exams in psychiatry and/or couple therapy.
