Personality Profile & Eye Movement

There is no provable link between personality type and eye movement. But there is a lot of proof that eye movement is linked to things which affect your personal behavior, like mood, mental state, and even mental illness. Eye movements provide a wealth of information about what a person is doing and why.

Dishonesty

• People avoid direct eye contact while lying, but because everyone knows it practiced liars often learn to maintain eye contact, says psychologist Dr Paul Ekman in Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage, published in 2009. Ironically, the more dishonest someone is, the less likely he will be caught out. Ekman found that one group of people consistently made prolonged eye-contact while lying--pathological liars. So although shifty eyes are a good indication of lying, honest eyes are not. And Ekman points out that avoiding eye contact can be a sign of fear, so if someone believes he is being judged guilty, he may look guilty although he is innocent.

Mental Illness

• People suffering from schizophrenia, or at risk of developing it, have problems with visually following moving objects. In 2001, studies at the Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo and the University of Medical Sciences in Poznan, Poland, showed that smooth eye movements--those used to follow moving objects--are replaced by rapid eye movements--usually used to read a book or look around a room--in schizophrenics. The link between eye-tracking problems and schizophrenia is so strong that eye testing can be used to test for the illness. But that does not mean that it's possible to tell someone is schizophrenic by watching their eyes. The differences in eye movements are so small they are scarcely perceptible in everyday life, and they do not affect ordinary activities like driving a car or skipping rope.

Desire

• Scientists have known about the link between enlarged pupils and sexual arousal since the 1970s, when Eckhard Hess, a biopsychologist at the University of Chicago, noticed his assistant's pupils grew when he looked at a photo of a pin-up girl, as described in his book The Tell-Tale Eye: How Your Eyes Reveal Hidden Thoughts and Emotions. Hess also found that people found potential partners more attractive if they had large pupils. Even before that, sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson had noticed that someone who is sexually aroused will glance often and quickly at the object of attraction, which they described in their book Human Sexual Response in 1966. But dilated pupils and glances are not a sure sign of sexual attraction--Hess claimed that a man's pupils will also dilate while looking at a landscape, and a woman's at the sight of a baby.