What is the psychology behind the strong feeling when maintaining eye contact with the person we like?

[Hannah3434]

What is the psychology behind the strong feeling when maintaining eye contact with the person we like?

Updates

+1 y

What is this feeling?

[RagnarRedbeard]

I think that’s just the way natural attraction works. Humans only began to speak about 200,000 years ago, before that they communicated non-verbally. Something like 93% of our face to face communication today is non-verbal according to some.

Before that point since humans would have communicated non-verbally it would have been entirely based on things like eye contact and body language, just like any other animal.

Eye contact is one of the most important non-verbal forms of communication. You can tell a lot about the kind of person somebody is, how they feel about you, how confident/shy they are based on that.

Strong eye contact can have different effects depending on the two people. Between two people who don’t know each other well it creates tension.

Between a man and a woman that tension is by definition sexual. If there’s a lack of attraction on one side the other will see it as weird, maybe threatening, and uncomfortable as they try to figure out the intentions of the other person.

If both are attracted to each other however the sexual tension is enjoyable and naturally creates feelings of arousal. That’s all that the magical “connection” people speak about really is. It’s a chemical process really.

[caring__1]

This is a cultural thing. If you compare the US with Mexico, in the US, looking at someone in the eyes is a sign of respect. In Mexico, looking at someone in the eyes is a sign of disrespect. It's just something we're taught, and we rarely question our early indoctrinations. Some people believe eye contact shows a connection and a feeling of having the other person's attention, yet some people can knit while watching TV and never drop a stitch.

[Anonymous]

The longer we hold eye contact with the a person that we might like the more “connected” we feel. It’s almost like charging a battery you use a charger until it’s fully powered. There has been studies that when you have two people look into each other’s eyes for at least 30 seconds then they have an instant connection to each other.