Our eyebrows, in addition to having an important place in social communication with their movements and shape-changing abilities, also have some benefits that we do not often think about, by preventing sweat from entering your eyes on hot days.
Essentially, people’s eyebrows serve several basic functions. First, they help prevent sweat from dripping into our eyes and blurring our vision. Secondly, and most interestingly, they are an important tool for non-verbal communication. This may seem simple at first, but if you delve a little deeper into the topic of eyebrows, you may come across some interesting insights into human behavior and development. Surprise, flirtation, anger, sadness, disbelief, confusion, sympathy, and many other emotions can be quickly expressed by twitching and curling the eyebrow in different ways.
Perhaps the most common expression is a raised eyebrow, which often signifies surprise. This is because in the first moments of shock, your eyes open wide, causing the eyebrows to rise, in order to take in the surrounding scenery as much as possible. People can easily pick up on this cue in others, allowing us to gauge the internal emotional state of those around us.
Similarly, when we are interested in something, our eyebrows lift, emphasizing how open our eyes are to what’s in front of us. This is why we raise our eyebrows when we flirt or engage in conversation.
Many of these eyebrow movements are subconscious, and there is some evidence that some simple expressions are universal across cultures, suggesting that they become “hard-wired” in us through development.
Eyebrow movements and different cultures
But other aspects of eyebrow expressions are culture-specific. An interesting 2011 study suggested that some cultures rely more on eyebrows for expression than others. For example, Chinese participants in the study were found to use eyes more to represent facial expressions, while the group the researchers called “Western Caucasians” used eyebrows and mouth.
Beyond expressing emotions, eyebrows also play an important role in facial recognition. People are extremely adept at recognizing faces. In fact, we are acutely programmed to detect faces in ordinary inanimate objects even when we know there is no one there. Thanks to this ability, we can see human faces on Mars, the Moon, rocks and many other surfaces.
Research suggests that eyebrows play as important a role as the eyes in facial recognition. In a 2003 article on the subject, “We find that the absence of eyebrows on familiar faces leads to a very large and significant deterioration in recognition performance. “In fact, a much greater decrease in facial recognition is observed in the absence of eyebrows than in the absence of eyes.”
It is also noteworthy that the eyebrows of Homo sapiens do not resemble the eyebrows of our distant relatives. Unlike many of our extinct ancestors, such as Homo heidelbergensis, which had thick, stiff eyebrows, we have a smooth forehead with more visible, hairy eyebrows with a greater range of motion. A 2018 study looked at this issue and concluded that our thin eyebrows are a big factor in our development, allowing us to develop sophisticated communication skills that lead to the establishment of large, complex social networks.
In short, it can easily be said that one of the things that make us human is our eyebrows.
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