When I saw this article provocatively titled “Revealed: The reason why we close our eyes while sharing a kiss“, I instantly wanted to read it. I tend to immediately click on any link with the word “REVEALED” in the title,simply because I need to know what is being revealed… and I’m sure the person who titled the article is aware of the fact that human beings in general are curious and in my case, very nosy.
I was also drawn to read the article because my older sister had a boyfriend who kissed her with his eyes open, and it was very weird to me. He also always wore knee high suede boots with fringe, but that’s for another study. I’m sure being spied on by a child while he was trying to kiss his girlfriend was not very pleasant for him but he can write his own piece about that.
Imagine my frustration when the article revealed NOTHING specifically about kissing except to very simply state that the study did not focus on kissing. I felt scammed, tricked, and misled.
Strangely, or not so strangely, the media has largely been using the results of this study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology to explain why we close our eyes during kissing, but the study did not actually involve kissing.
The study conducted by Polly Dalton and Sandra Murphy, cognitive psychologists at Royal Holloway, University of London, concluded that when in sensory overload “selective attention” comes into play when prioritizing the most important task on which to focus, which certainly could explain why we close our eyes when kissing in order to focus on kissing rather than what else is happening such as why is that guy wearing fringed suede boots?
Ι find it interesting that nobody is mentioning that when you keep your eyes open while kissing, the person you are kissing looks like a one-eyed cyclops. Try it, it’s true, maybe my sister’s ex was into that kind of thing, though that still doesn’t explain the boots.
The study consisted of 16 participants ranging in age from 18-36, with the average age being 21 years old. The participants completed letter-searching tasks of varying difficulty, the tactile response was measured by responding to a mild vibration applied to one of their hands. An analysis of the results found that people were less responsive to the vibration as their eyes did more work.
Besides these findings unofficially being attributed to why we close our eyes when we kiss, Sandra Murphy states that an example of the importance of the study points to the need for tactile alerts in cars rather than visual ones to signal when the car begins drifting into an oncoming lane, as visual ones may not be noticed when engaged in other tasks while driving, such as searching for an address at a busy intersection.
As the kids say, when unimportant details are valued over important ones, “weird flex, but ok”. The media choosing to proclaim these findings answer the age old question “why do we kiss with our eyes closed” rather than focus on the importance of the need for car modifications that may literally save lives is indeed a weird flex.
I’m curious about what tactile alerts will be installed in cars,even without the research findings I can tell you, I would be more aware of my driving if I was smacked in the face as an alert.
