14 DAY TRIAL // A study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE on April 10 brings forth scientific evidence in favor of the claim that men lack “talent” when it comes to reading and understanding women's emotions.
The conclusions listed in this study were reached after a team of researchers asked several volunteers to take their time to look at a series of pictures displaying both male and female eyes, and later on try to guess what emotions these pairs of eyes conveyed.
By the looks of it, the 22 volunteers who agreed to take part in this research were twice as efficient when pinning down the emotions experienced by the men whose eyes were shown in the pictures than they were making head and tail of the women's eyes and the emotions associated with them.
Live Science informs us that, with the help of brain scans, the researchers have even managed to pin down the underlying cause of the volunteers' being pretty much incapable of picking up on the women's emotions.
Thus, it appears that the parts of the male brain which are linked to emotions, empathy and behavior activate more strongly when men look at pictures showing the eyes of other men than they do when they are made to look at pictures of female eyes.
“To determine possible differences in the neural correlates underlying emotion recognition from female, as compared to male eyes, a modified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test in combination with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was applied to a sample of 22 participants,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
“We found that men actually had twice as many problems in recognizing emotions from female as compared to male eyes, and that these problems were particularly associated with a lack of activation in limbic regions of the brain (including the hippocampus and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex),” they went on to argue.
This study's lead researcher was Boris Schiffer, a specialist working with the LWL-University Hospital in Bochum, Germany.