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liberal N proud

(60,298 posts)
Wed Apr 17, 2013, 07:32 AM Apr 2013

It's true: Men can't read women's emotions, study confirms

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, published Wednesday (April 10) in the journal PLOS ONE, 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.


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.


http://bodyodd.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/14/17748017-its-true-men-cant-read-womens-emotions-study-confirms?lite


So maybe now, my wife will tell me what she is thinking? Maybe not!
6 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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It's true: Men can't read women's emotions, study confirms (Original Post) liberal N proud Apr 2013 OP
More Like - ''I Told You So'' cantbeserious Apr 2013 #1
what i found most interesting is mens mind did not engage in the effort of telling emotion. seabeyond Apr 2013 #2
Women are non-threatening, pscot Apr 2013 #3
when women are subjugated they can be ignored because of insignificance. seabeyond Apr 2013 #4
I was actually thinking more in terms pscot Apr 2013 #5
i "get" where you were going. yes. it is a guess. as much, equal to suggesting women being seabeyond Apr 2013 #6
 

seabeyond

(110,159 posts)
2. what i found most interesting is mens mind did not engage in the effort of telling emotion.
Wed Apr 17, 2013, 08:03 AM
Apr 2013

and my thought would be the dismissal men are taught from a young age, to do with women. so i read the rest of the article. one can argue the evo answer, and not surprised by that at all, but the bottom line is the dismissal of women as less, inferior, insignificant that created this. i do not think i would be throwing that at a wife as an "i told you so". though i am a strong believer she talk to you and not expect you to read her mind. i hate that when that is expected by me. BUT...


But exactly why this happens isn't clear. While men could be culturally conditioned to pay less attention to women's emotional cues, another possibility is that their differential response is hard-wired by humans' evolutionary past.

"As men were more involved in hunting and territory fights, it would have been important for them to be able to predict and foresee the intentions and actions of their male rivals," the researchers write in the paper.

pscot

(21,023 posts)
3. Women are non-threatening,
Wed Apr 17, 2013, 10:43 AM
Apr 2013

at least in a physical sense, and can therefore be safely ignored. That sounds terribly dismissive, but in a high threat environment, where survival is at stake, it would have been huge.

 

seabeyond

(110,159 posts)
4. when women are subjugated they can be ignored because of insignificance.
Wed Apr 17, 2013, 11:14 AM
Apr 2013

and we know for a fact, that women were just that in most of our history.

as a mom, you do not think my boys cannot read me? in a shot. i am the one that is "threatening" and they damn well know it will behoove them to take the time and figure out where i am, emotionally.

queen of england? do you really think she would not have been threatening and it behooved men to read her?

pscot

(21,023 posts)
5. I was actually thinking more in terms
Wed Apr 17, 2013, 11:23 AM
Apr 2013

of a pre-historic, perhaps even pre-human tribal setting. Obvously, getting on the bad side of you, or Elizabeth 1st, would be fraught with danger.

 

seabeyond

(110,159 posts)
6. i "get" where you were going. yes. it is a guess. as much, equal to suggesting women being
Wed Apr 17, 2013, 12:44 PM
Apr 2013

subjugated thru out history as insignificant, a step above an animal is an even more likely "guess" since we have history backing that evidence. yours is mere story telling.

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