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It's not a cliché that men just don't understand women. There's actual research suggesting guys really do struggle to read women's emotions. At least from their eyes.
We know this because 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 to measure their brain activity.
The scientists then asked the men to look at images of 36 pairs of eyes, half from men and half from women, and guess the emotion those people felt.
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The men then had to choose 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 identifying emotion in women's eyes.
Additionally, their brains showed different activation when looking at men's versus women's eyes. Men's amygdala — a region in the brain linked to emotions, empathy, and fear — was activated more strongly in response to men's eyes.
Also, other brain areas tied to emotion and behavior didn't activate as much when the men looked at women's eyes.
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The results indicate that men are worse at reading women's emotions. This "theory of mind" is one of the foundations for empathy, so the scientists suggest this could mean that men can have less empathy for women relative to men.
But the cause that leads to this is still unknown. While men could be culturally conditioned to pay less attention to women's emotional cues, there's also the possibility 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 explained in the paper.
When it comes to simple biology, the picture is a bit easier to read. A YouGov study conducted in the UK in 2019 asked British men to label a diagram of female genitalia, and the results were actually abysmal. Well, over half of surveyed men could not label the vagina or labia, and the majority could not point out where it is that urine comes out.
