This is what happens when you keep your eyes for 4 minutes (social experiment)
The psychologist and philosopher Dr. Arthur Aron , professor at the University of Stony Brook (New York), has spent 40 years studying love, friendship, intimacy and all those elements that reinforce and induce interpersonal closeness.
With this objective, Arthur carried out a study in which different people had to hold their eyes in their partner's eyes for 4 minutes. Previously, all of them had answered 36 questions created especially to deepen emotional connections.
This week, the team of the Mensalus Psychological Assistance Institute presents this interesting video in which we observe the results of the experiment and verify the enormous power of the gaze.
The power of a simple look
First of all, you can visualize the audiovisual content below:
Why 4 minutes are so revealing?
The communication reaches its maximum splendor at the moment in which we make use of all the senses. This implementation does not necessarily have to be simultaneous, the important thing is that we give prominence to each of them at the right time and pay attention to their idiosyncrasies.
In fact, offering exclusivity to a sense, at times, can become a powerful amplifier of interaction. And not only that; can, in a matter of seconds, get to delve into concepts that go beyond words.
In our day to day, do we look?
We watch but we do not always contemplate. Actually, we miss doing it and even feel uncomfortable ("you make me nervous", "why do you look at me and do not say anything", "I can not hold my gaze for so many seconds", etc.).
The 4 minutes serve the participants of the experiment for just that, to contemplate the person in his plenitude and to make a mutual recognition. The result is questions and answers from the silence that find a common thread: complicity.
The dialogue that is established is exciting. Some eyes say "tell me about you" and the others respond "I talk about what I am when I am with you".
Some define "this is what unites us" while the others respond "this is what makes us the couple we are". Some ask "tell me what you want" and the others answer "keep listening to everything that, until now, we had not spent time to tell us." It seems that the talks have no end.
How can we enhance the look in communication?
To begin with, integrating it in all contexts, not only in those more intimate spaces. The gaze is, as we indicated, an act of mutual recognition. Avoiding eye contact is a sign of distance and disconnection (we unlink the person we have in front of our message). If we do not contemplate the other, we downplay their position. That is why it is so important to transmit your worth through looking and being watched.
The "speaking" gaze is accompanied by active listening, of mindfulness. To be present in the here and now involves a look that flows to the sound of the words: an attentive but not fixed look.
Many times, we look at the other but we do not listen, we only hear ...
True. We look, yes, but we are thinking about aspects unrelated to the conversation. This look is clearly different: it loses consistency, it is empty, expressionless. Looking closely includes an "eye dance" that accompanies the rhythm of the words. In that instant, the gaze feeds on the emotion evoked by the discourse and communication offers and receives, it is not static. This is how he manages to bring both parties closer together.
In what other ways can we "shorten distances"?
The closeness in personal relationships depends of course on several factors, but there are two elements that are especially important in communication. We talk about the tone of voice and body language.
Learning to listen to the tone and the body is something that we work from Psychology and Coaching. For example, in those occasions where the patient expresses incomprehension or manifests feeling misunderstood, we not only analyze the explicit discourse, we also read the format, both the one that is seen and the one that is heard. It is revealing when, in future conversations, these formats change and the sensations are totally different ("we have said the same thing but this time I have not felt alone").
Is emotion the protagonist of the approach?
Exact. That feeling that emerges from the interaction is what, most of the time, marks the course of the following. For this reason it is so important to read our language and learn to empathize with the language of the other.
With what message can we stay today?
Communication is complex and precise to be attended to as it deserves. That said, perhaps we can keep a valuable message that launches the experiment we have shared today:
"In communication, enjoy and feel powerful to look and be watched."
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