Posted on 04/16/2013 5:49:33 PM PDT by Sir Napsalot
It's a cliché that men just don't understand women.
Now, new research suggests men really do struggle to read women's emotions — at least from their eyes.
The research, ... showed that men had twice as much trouble deciphering women's emotions from images of their eyes compared with those of men. Parts of the male brain tied to emotion also didn't activate as strongly when the men looked at women's eyes.
(snip)
To see whether men really did have trouble reading women's emotions, Boris Schiffer, a researcher at the LWL-University Hospital in Bochum, Germany and his colleagues put 22 men between the ages of 21 and 52, with an average age of 36, in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which uses blood flow as a measure of to measure their brain activity.
They then asked the men to look at images of 36 pairs of eyes, half from men and half from women, and guess the emotion the people felt. The men then chose which of two words, such as distrustful or terrified, best described the eyes' emotion. The eye photographs depicted positive, neutral, and negative emotions.
Men took longer and had more trouble correctly guessing emotion from women's eyes.
In addition, their brains showed different activation when looking at men versus women's eyes. Men's amygdala — a brain region tied to emotions, empathy, and fear — activated more strongly in response to men's eyes. In addition, other brain regions tied to emotion and behavior didn't activate as much when the men looked at women's eyes.
The findings suggest that men are worse at reading women's emotions. This "theory of mind" is one of the foundations for empathy, so the deficit could lead men to have less empathy for women relative to men, the researchers write.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
However, if the researchers had asked men to identify eyes from people they are familiar with (i.e. spouse, their own children or family members, etc.), the correct answer might be up.
Another thing is, apparently men (and women) can read dogs' emotions much more accurately. ===> Thought I throw in something lighter for discussion.
We’re supposed to look at the eyes?
What’s to unnerstand, they’ve got cold, cold hearts.
We're not speed readers is why.
What are these things called emotions?
Don’t look them in the eyes, they steal your soul that way.
OK, suppose we are having a conversation and I read her emotion right and then she turns around and in about 5 seconds I swear when she turns around I’m probably facing a totally different emotion that came out of nowhere. I wish they would change colors like lizards.
I’m stealin’ that.
Well, when a women wags her tail like my dog does, I know precisely what she wants.
Emotions, what are you doin’
Oh, don’t you know
Don’t you know you’ll be my ruin
(M.Tillis / R.Kearney)
(Brenda Lee)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iVgcHo6xe0
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