Love is in the Gaze: An Eye-Tracking Study of Love and Sexual Desire.

Reading other people's eyes is a valuable skill during interpersonal interaction. Although a number of studies have investigated visual patterns in response to a broad variety of emotions, little is known about eye gaze when it comes to differentiating love vs. lust. To address this question, we conducted two experiments: 1) one testing whether the visual pattern related to the perception of love would differ from that of lust; and 2) one study testing whether the visual pattern related to the expression of love would differ from that of lust. Our results show that a person's eye gaze shifts as a function of the observers' goal when looking at a visual stimulus. Such identification of a distinct visual pattern for love vs. lust (sexual desire) could have theoretical and clinical importance in couple therapy when these two phenomena are difficult to disentangle from one another based on patients' self-reports.