When you talk to this person, you feel heard and understood, as though this person really gets you.

In anger, we have a “glare,” where the upper eyelid is raised and the brow is lowered, that puts pressure on the upper eyelid, and the lower eyelid is tense.

“standing tall and straight,” is the universal expression of readiness, preparedness, and confidence in the face of a challenge.

Darwin outlines three principles, which—he suggests—explain the majority of body language. The first two of these he calls the principle of “serviceable expressions” and the principle of “antithesis.”5 According to his principle of serviceable expressions, some body movements and expressions arise as an instinctual result of strong emotion; they ei

the evidence is as close to conclusive as evidence ever gets, that Darwin was right and Mead was wrong: there are six or seven emotions that have a universal expression.4 The role of the eyes—or the muscles around the eyes, to be precise—is the same,

I recalled a line from Gertrude Stein, on Stein’s native Oakland, California: “There’s no there there.”

We’re going to get over our fear and discomfort around eye contact—“systematically desensitize” ourselves to it—in several manageable steps: Making progressively lengthy eye contact with a friend or family

Penetrative, objectifying visual attention from males has even been dubbed the “male gaze” by academics and has been the subject of countless scholarly articles, particularly within literary criticism and critical theory.22

“The eye is already important for many primates, and we humans with our whites around our eyes have enhanced that. By putting whites around the iris, the direction of movement becomes even more conspicuous.”9