Body Language of Eye Widening
Cue: Eye Widening
Synonym(s): Baby Eyes, Wide Eyes.
Description: Making the eyes appear bigger than normal through plucking the eyebrows, raising the eyebrows or lifting the eyelids.
In One Sentence: Eye widening is a signal that says one is enjoying what they are seeing.
How To Use it: Show positive emotions by keeping the eyes open and inviting. Women can effectively and near permanently increase the perception of their eye size by plucking their brows. This creates the illusion of having larger eyes that actual fact.
While men do not benefit in the same way from this cue, open eyes in women signals that they are more childlike and therefore worthy of protection. If women desire special treatment, emphasizing the size of the eyes is highly effective.
Context: General, Dating.
Verbal Translation: “By widening my eyes you can see how big and childlike my eyes are, therefore you need to help and protect me.”
Variant: Related to Eye Flash, Eye Pop and Flashbulb Eyes as well as Eye Squinting or Narrowing Eyes (for opposite cue).
Cue In Action: It was a cold morning and she didn’t want to go out to the car and warm it. She turned her head to the side, batted her eyes, raised her eyebrows and opened her eyes wide, pleading. Her Dad had no choice but to give her a hand.
Meaning and/or Motivation: Eye widening is a positive nonverbal cue indicating that someone is observing positive stimuli that bring them joy and happiness. It may indicate surprise and shock.
Raising the eyebrows and eyelids can also be used to simulate widened eyes. Plucking the eyebrows has the same effect as eye widening, except it is permanent. The appearance of big bright eyes may be why we have culturally encouraged women to shrink the size of their brow.
Have you ever noticed the size of a newborns eyes in relation to their body and face? What about cartoon characters? Eye widening evokes protective feelings in others and women will use this to gain sympathy from men during courtship. Research has shown that when women widen their eyes, men release hormones that motive them to protect and defend.
Eye widening is a form of gravity defying behaviour that is ubiquitous in showing positive emotions and joy. When true contentment is present the eyes will lack any tension at all and will appear relaxed. The size of the eyes directly indicates how positive someone feels about a topic. While making eyes bigger and flashing them means that good thoughts are held, squinting, where the eyes are compressed, means negative thought are held.
Cue Cluster: Eye widening is clustered with head to the side, batting eyelashes, raised eyebrows, eyelids opened, shoulders turned inward, head up with smiling or pouting to gain sympathy.
Body Language Category: Appease, Approach tell, Courtship display, Eye Language, Indicators of sexual interest (IOsI), Open facial gestures, Pseudo-infantile gestures, Power play, Remotivating, Signature gestures, Submissive body language, Tie signals.
Resources:
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