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 ...
Thanks, you go girl.
i am glad i don’t understand women’s emotions. half the time they can’t understand them.
LOL!
I am usually mean to newbies but your sense of humor cancels a lot of faults...
and unless you are very handsome, or rich, it don’t work. if you’re very handsome and rich they’ll pester you for sex.
Does this ever explain a lot. We have been open books men. All along they had our number. Oh well.
A man’s biggest fear in life is that his wife sells his guns for what he told her he payed for them.
Like Jeff Foxworthy said, you can always know what a guy is thinking.....”I want a beer...and I want to see sumpthin’ naked.”
wait.... Women have emotions? That explains a lot...
Of course we can’t read women’s emotions - and if we could, they’d change the signals.
You are old enough to know the truth of the old Italian proverb: Women are meant to be loved, not understood.
I've had to settle for that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.