Did You Know Your Pupils Can Reveal How You Feel?
“The pupils can dilate or constrict in size depending on whether or no you like what you see”
A Marvel
We’ve all heard the phrase ‘eyes are windows to the soul,’ and this is because your eyes can reveal your mental and emotional state more clearly than any other body part can. The eyes are also a marvel – they see, gaze, glance, blink, wink, stare and cry.
The Pupils
The pupils appear like two black spots at the centre-position of the eyes. These spots are openings that vary in size according to the changes In light, in bright light, their size decreases to about two millimeters across and when the light decreases their size increases to almost four times its size, in bright light.
What Pupil Dilation Means
The pupils are also equally affected by emotional changes because they can dilate or constrict in size depending on whether or not you like what you see. When something excites you, whether in a positive sense like pleasure or in a negative sense like tear, your pupils expand more than usual. And when you see something that is distasteful, they contract.
Pupil dilation correlates so much with emotional arousal that researchers use pupil size, or pupillometry, to investigate a lot of psychological phenomena like introversion, sexual orientation, sleepiness, depression, decision making, moral judgment etc.
Unconscious Signals
Another interestingly important fact related to pupil dilation is that just the way humans express these changes in pupils unconsciously, they also receive these signals unconsciously and get affected by it, without even realizing it. Studies show that people get attracted towards people whose pupils are dilated. And this is because of a subconscious feeling, that as their pupils are dilated. they must be finding us likable.
When In Love
Between a couple, when the first person looks into the second person’s eyes and finds that the second person’s pupils are dilating, the first person feels liked and likable. This makes the first person’s pupils to dilate too. Now, looking at the first person’s pupils dilating, the second person also goes through the same cycle. So this is exactly why people in love’ tend to keep looking into each other’s eyes. It is all about dilated pupils!
Social Intelligence
You might wonder how the message conveyed by the pupils can be observed with the naked eyes. But though it seems difficult, the tact is each one of us is programmed to subconsciously register it. It is only about honing one’s ‘social intelligence,’ which is the ability to observe nonverbal behavior to understand emotions. The eyes are quite literally windows to a person’s mind. Thus, all you need is the knowledge and skill to see through them.
Freudian Analysis of Dreams
Are our dreams trying to talk to us? What can they communicate that would otherwise never surface to our conscious minds? Our conscious mind is merely the tip of the iceberg, whereas the subconscious and unconscious minds are the submerged regions underneath. We can access our subconscious by directing our focus to it. The unconscious though, isn’t the same and the same goes for the most recessed parts of the subconscious. Our dreams are one of the means of illustrating these submerged sections of the mind. Let’s have a look at our dreams through the lexicon of Freud.
What Are Dreams Made Of?
Sigmund Freud considered dreams to be made up of two principles: Wish fulfilment and manifest vs latent content. Dreams attempt to illustrate the subconscious through symbols. Why symbols? Because it’s the only means of communicating for the subconscious. The subconscious mind is the residence of our fears, desires and emotions which are censored by the conscious mind in an attempt to protect us.
Manifest content contains the actual dream retained in the memory and the latent content is the unfulfilled wish that forms the basis of our investigation of the dream. By the concept of wish fulfilment, dreams are attempts by the unconscious to resolve some conflict and desire of the mind.
Free Association
Freud postulates that dreams can be analysed through a technique called free association. This Involves focusing on the symbols, thoughts and emotions of the dream rather than its direct content. This process usually incites a further flow of thoughts and emotions connected to the dreams. Usually, the Information obtained through this process is very cryptic, and fragmented due to the obvious nature of the dreams.
The key to analysis lies in deciphering the cryptic symbols, finding the right links and weaving them together. There you go, that was Freudian analysis of dreams in a nutshell.