Your eyes… they do speak, darling

Some they the eyes are the windows to the soul. Just how true is that, if at all? Researchers from Germany and Australia studied eye movements in order to see 😉 if these very movements could predict personality traits!

42 participants eye movements were studied in the context of asking of them to run an errand on a university campus. Their personality was then assessed using well-established questionnaires.

What is referred to as the big 5 personality traits were actually reliably predicted from this eye movement analysis. These 5 personality traits are: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Although some associations have been made in the past between eye movement and behavior, here, for the first time, visual behavior was studied to predict four of the five personality traits mentioned above.

Different characteristics of eye movements were recorded such as:

Saccades;
Fixations;
Blinks;
Pupil diameter;
Raw gaze.

What was specifically done in the context of this study that had not bee done before is the extraction of the most important eye movement for each personality trait! For example, pupil diameter was important for predicting neuroticism but was less useful for predicting other traits.

This study brings up interesting perspectives for posturologists and Functional Neurology practitioners. Could it be that, by improving eye coordination, we are modulating personality?

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00105/full#F1