Notes by blinking Our blinking can say a lot

The eye-stroke says more than words

"You can not not communicate," Paul Watzlawick stated in his ground rules on human communication. This thesis is also shown in a recent study on blinking. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics investigated how participants respond when their interviewee blinks at either short or longer intervals.

A recent study by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics suggests that the pauses between the eye-strokes can influence the respondent's reaction. The results suggest that prolonged pauses between blinking suggest that one understands what is being told. Short blink breaks signal rather a lack of understanding. The study results were recently published in the journal "Plos one".

According to researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the pauses between the blink of an eye betray whether one has understood what has been said or not. (Image: babsi_w / fotolia.com)

The nonverbal communication with the eyesight

One person blinks ten to fifteen times a minute. Hardly anyone consciously perceives this movement despite the frequency of the eye-blink - and yet we seem to communicate something to our counterpart with the frequency of blinking. The behavior is influenced, among other things, by how often we blink, according to the research team led by study leader Paul Hömke. Communication tests showed that frequent blinking led to longer answers from the other person and rather encourages longer blinking breaks to shorter answers.

Course of the study

Hömke's team had 35 participants communicate with computer-generated interlocutors, without the subjects knowing what the study was about. The digital interlocutors, called avatars by the researchers, asked the participants certain questions such as: "What did you do on the weekend?"

The unconscious feedback about the eye strike

As the participants responded, the avatars responded with either short or long breaks between the eye strikes. It showed that the answers were on average several seconds shorter, if the avatar made long breaks between the eye strikes. In contrast, the answers were longer, if more was winked.

What the eye-stroke conveys

The linguistics researchers have a theory of how blinking influences conversation. Long blink of an eye would give the interlocutor a feeling of being understood, which tends to make him or her shorter. Short pauses, on the other hand, suggest that one has not understood what has been said, whereby the other person is more likely to tell a more detailed version. According to researchers, this is a new factor in mutual understanding in everyday social interaction. (Vb)