Eyes reveal a lot. Be careful on your date next time as researchers have found that they can also spot the difference between love and lust.
According to a fascinating study, eye patterns concentrate on a stranger's face if the viewer sees that person as a potential partner in romantic love.
The viewer gazes more at the rest of the body if he or she is feeling sexual desire.
"The findings suggest how automatic attentional processes, such as eye gaze, may differentiate feelings of love from feelings of desire toward strangers," explained lead author Stephanie Cacioppo, director of the high-performance electrical neuro-imaging laboratory at University of Chicago.
In the new study, researchers performed experiments to assess two different emotional states - romantic love and sexual desire (lust).
Male and female students from University of Geneva were shown photographs containing photos of young, adult couples who were looking at or interacting with each other.
They were also shown photographs of opposite sex who were looking directly at the camera/viewer.
The participants were asked to decide rapidly whether they perceived people in the photograph as eliciting feelings of sexual desire or romantic love.
The eye-tracking data revealed marked differences in eye movement patterns.
"People tended to visually fixate on the face, especially when they said an image elicited a feeling of romantic love. However, with images that evoked sexual desire, the subjects' eyes moved from the face to fixate on the rest of the body," Cacioppo added.
By identifying eye patterns that are specific to love-related stimuli, "we can develop a bio-marker that differentiates between feelings of romantic love and sexual desire," co-author John Cacioppo noted.
The paper was published in the journal Psychological Science.
