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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Blinking

By Karan Scott


Eyes communicate a lot about what you feel and what you are thinking. They can show everything from how you feel about yourself to attraction to aggression. Your eye contact and your blinking are strong non-verbal signals. When you communicate with someone, whether you know it or not, you are sending and receiving messages from their eyes. These signals are an honest form of communication about what you are thinking or feeling. We often believe a person's non-verbal signals over the words they say because this form of communication is often less contrived and more truthful than verbal communication.

Blinking is the act of opening and closing the eyes. We blink to lubricate and filter our eyes. Blinking keeps our eyes moisturized and keeps irritants out. Blinking is necessary for your eyes to keep objects in view. Every time you blink, your eyes re-adapt to changes in light and refocus what you are looking at.

Blinking is natural but the rate at which we blink can say something about us. All of the non-verbal signals we send with our eyes send a message to the people we're communicating with. The times you should really pay attention to a person's blinking is when it speeds up or slows down. Increased or decreased rate of blinking can mean different things depending on the person and the situation. Use these suggestions only as guidelines about what may be going on

Blinking quickly generally means that a person is alert. This can mean a number of things. They may be excited, lying, stressed out, nervous or uncomfortable. Their blinking is giving away the fact that something has energized or stressed them. It's hard to know just from a person's blinking what they are feeling though.

Blinking quickly doesn't necessarily mean they are experiencing a positive or a negative feeling. They could be stressed in social situations, they could be lying, or they might feel threatened in this particular conversation. They could even be day dreaming. One study showed that blinking more often was a signal that we were checking out from our surroundings. You can't know exactly what quick blinking means until you get more clues from their other types of communication.

Slow blinking is usually a sign a person's body is slowing down. Unusually slow blinking could show that someone is bored either in the situation or the conversation. When a person is bored, their system slows down because they are relaxed. Think of a time when you were watching a lecture and got really bored and your eyes got heavy. Hopefully it won't be as exaggerated as the slow blinking of a person nodding off. But it's the same idea. Their blinking gets slow when they stop engaging.

Blinking slowly could also be a sign that the person is trying to look calm. If someone recognizes the fact that they are blinking more quickly because they are nervous, lying or stressed, they may purposefully try to control it. If the person overcompensates, however, their blinking could look unusually slow.

Changes in blinking speed can show many different thoughts or feelings. These differences in blinking can mean something different in a different situation or from one person to the next. To have a better idea of what these changes in blinking mean, pay attention to other verbal and non-verbal clues the person is sending.




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