We already know that through the smell mothers can transmit certain fears to their children, but a sense as developed as sight could not be indifferent to the expression of this emotion by adults. The baby detects the fear in your eyes, knows when we are scared, from seven months.
Specifically, it is when we put what is colloquially known as "eyes as plates", when the baby appreciates that we open the eyelids a lot and looks whiter of the eyes, when the baby perceives that we feel fear. In addition, the eyes can also betray where our fear comes from, since the way we open or move them will be different.
If the danger we perceive is in the environment, we tend to turn our eyes to one side, moving it quickly; if the threat comes from a person we have with us, we will stare at it: in each situation, the white portion of the eye we see will form a different drawing.
Children from seven months are able to read our feelings of fear by looking at our eyes, unconsciously, as concluded by a team from the Max Planck Institute of Neurological and Cognition Sciences, in Leipzig (Germany) and the Department of Psychology of the University of Virginia (USA).
The study, entitled "Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants" and has been published in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencies of the United States of America "(PNAS).
To prepare the research, they showed babies of that age eye images, while monitoring their brain activity with electrodes. This increased clearly when the expression they saw was scary and intensified if the fictional eyes were directed directly at theirs. Could it be said that those eyes conveyed fear?
The authors have wanted to relate these results to the social, cooperative and coexistence capacity of babies, very high since the first months, and of course before seven. But this would be one more fact and realizes the importance of nonverbal communication in people.
After knowing that the baby detects fear in the eyes, we ask ourselves, what will happen to other emotions such as surprise or anger? Is it possible to detect them also just by observing the eyes? To what extent do the rest of facial gestures influence the detection of feelings? In any case, it is quite clear that the eyes are the mirror of the soul ...
