If you have blue eyes, life takes a better view..

Press, 4 October 1977, Page 45

If you have blue eyes, life takes a better view..

By

ARNOLD LEGH

“Old blue eyes’’ was back again on telly the other night out-crooning friends Dean Martin and Tony Bennet as well as a bunch of other singers a third his age. But the secret of Sinatra’s extraordinary stamina may be due only in part to his legendary talent for timing and spotting a good sentimental song; it could just have something to do with the fact that his eyes are blue.

Eye colour, it appears, is related to personality and affects the way people behave. And not just people. According to zoologist John Glover it’s true of animals too.

Since 1974 Dr Glover from Chattanooga has been studying the behaviour of all sorts of animals — fruit-flies, locusts, snakes, the big cats, even birds of prey — and relating their behaviour to their eye colour. He reports in the current Journal of Psychology that there are consistent differences.

Animals with lightcoloured eyes (blue, yel-

lowish, light grey) tend to react in the wild in a particular way. If they are threatened by enemies or when they spot their own prey, they tend to "wait, freeze and stalk.”

They escape danger, or trap their victims, by the wily use of stealth. Darkeyed animals, on the other hand (those with dark grey, brown or black eyes), show a quite different pattern. Glover characterises their behaviour as “react, approach, flee.” Their actions are more explosive: they tend either to attack their enemy or

prey head-on or else, in self-defence, flee at top speed immediately. Glover brought in his colleague Dr A. L. Gary, a child psychologist, to see if differences of this sort existed between people of different eye colour. And they have found that indeed they do. Glover and Gary gave a large group of light-eyed and dark-eyed boys and girls a number of different psychological tests, designed to measure how well they were developing. They tested their English — how wide their vocabulary was expanding, how good was their understanding of grammar. He tested their maths, noted what games they liked to play, what sort of puzzles they were good at — twisted nail puzzles, jig-

saws, spotting missing parts and those puzzles in some comics where you have to spot the small differences between very similar drawings. Some of the tests the children had to do as quickly as possible; in others Glover and Gary were more concerned to see whether a child could apply him or herself to a problem consistently over a period of time. The dark-eyed children, it turned out, were much better at what Glover calls “reactive tests.” That is, they did better when

the tests were timed and there was pressure on them to react quickly; similarly, they were more energetic in their play and more inventive, too.

There were no differences between the darkeyed and the light-eyed in mathematics but the light eyed did seem to be developing faster on tests involving some careful consideration. application and staying power.

Since this experiment Glover and Gary have also found that adults show differences according to eye colour. In their latest project they find that light-eyed people are more patient, better listeners and are less affected by social pressures from those around them. They make the suggestion — one hopes not entirely seriously — that priests, psychiatrists, social workers and marriage counsellors might be in future selected as much for their eye colour as for anything else.

Glover and Gary believe that melanin (pigment) in the eye may affect one area of the brain and that this accounts for the differences they have found. Investigating this is the next stage of their research: meanwhile the happiest people should be those of us with green/hazel eyes. We have the best of both worlds and do well on all the tests. — “Sunday Times,” London.