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SALT LAKE CITY — Whether it's a result of nature or nurture, scientists say men can't read women's emotions, but they are superior in understanding other men's.
A group of German researchers found in their study "Why Don't Men Understand Women?" that while men can clearly read the emotions in other men's eyes, men are less capable at reading women's.
Though they did not look at why that is, leaving social and biological options open, they did suggest an evolutionary benefit.
"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," they wrote.
In previous studies, men have been able to easily recognize anger, while women are more apt to understand sadness and fear.
Related:
Girls wired for communication, researchers say
Girls' talkativeness and language skills have a biological explanation, researchers say.The authors of the current study conducted their experiment on 22 male participants. Participants viewed images of eyes from both men and women for 48 seconds each while undergoing an MRI.
While the men analyzed the eyes' emotions, scientists could see their brain activity. When a man viewed another man's eyes, they experienced a heightened activity in the right amygdala. Meanwhile, when they viewed images of a woman's eyes, scientists noted a lack of activation in limbic regions.
"Men are substantially less able to infer mental states expressed by women, which may be accompanied by sex-specific differences in amygdala activity," they wrote.
Another interesting finding of the study was the participants' use of memory while viewing the images. When men viewed the images of men's eyes, the hippocampus — an area associated with emotional memory — activated. This showed researchers that the men were drawing upon their past experience to determine the other person's mental state.
"In order to better understand and empathize with others, memories are projected to people that are seen as similar to oneself," the researchers wrote. "Emotion recognition might depend on self-referential processing since, in order to be successful, the observer tries to covertly mimic the other person's mental state, which then results in shared mental states between observer and observed person.
