Studies show link between eyes movement and mental health

The common wisdom is that the eyes are windows to the souls.

Along the same lines, Dr. Sharon Hunter is looking into children’s eyes for hints of psychosis.

Hunter, an associate professor of psychology on the Anschutz Medical Campus, was awarded a two-year $100,000 grant in July in order to study smooth eye movement in infants and how it could correlate to psychosis later in life.

Smooth eye movement is the technical term for something very simple: watching something move.

“The brain has to calculate the speed and trajectory of the movement,” said Hunter. “It takes some time, about a couple hundred milliseconds, for movement to take place.”

Well, if it’s such a simple thing, why study it?

“There are feedback mechanisms that keep your eye from getting ahead of the object, and people who have a family history of psychosis have trouble with this,” Hunter said.

So if the eyes can’t track things correctly, it’s a hint that something’s going on upstairs in the mind.

“I’m a part of a huge research group interested in schizophrenia and other mental illnesses,” Hunter said. “There’s the hope that we can develop an intervention—our hope is that we can protect the brain.”
 

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