Shine OnIt’s official: Men can’t read women’s emotional cues, study says
It's one of those age old stereotypes that creeps up in everything from literature to news media, movies and television shows: Men are emotionally daft, unable to understand the subtle emotional cues of the more delicate members of the species, namely babies and women.
But does this stereotype have any legitimate basis in science? At least one research study claims it does.
New research out of the University Hospital in Bochum, Germany says men often don’t have a clue what a woman’s eyes are communicating.
The study -- published last week in the journal PLOS ONE -- found that when men looked at close-up photos of human eyes they were twice as likely to incorrectly identify the mood expressed in the eyes of woman, as opposed to a the eyes of a man.
Lead researcher Boris Schiffer and his colleagues used a sample size of 22 men between the ages of 21 and 52, with an average age of 36. They put those men through a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner (MRI), which uses blood flow and other indicators to measure brain activity.
According to the researchers, the men's amygdala -- the brain region tied to emotion, empathy and fear -- was activated in a stronger way when they looked at other men's eyes.
The hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with past feelings and thoughts, was also activated when men looked at other men's eyes, suggesting they were able to relate what they saw in male eyes to their own experience.
The reason for these findings is unclear, however, the researchers offer possible explanations.
"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 their paper.
This isn't the first academic study to feed into the stereotype that men are neanderthals incapable of understanding complex emotions.
A study from last year suggests that men have a hard time being friends with women because they mistakenly assume their female friend is attracted to them by inaccurately interpreting her behaviour.
Along these same lines, a 2008 study involving university men suggests that they often interpret friendly cues from women, like a smile, as a sexual come-on.
