London - New research has proven what many men the world over have already discovered to their chagrin - that they simply do not know what women are feeling.
The study published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS One) earlier this month found that men had twice as much trouble understanding women's emotions from their eyes as those of other men.
Compounding this, the researchers found that the part of the male brain linked to emotion was not as active when men looked at women's eyes - indicating a hard-wired biological lack of understanding for what women feel.
Gathering 22 men between the ages of 21 and 52, with an average of 36 at the LWL-University Hospital in Bochum, Germany, researcher Boris Schiffer put them into a a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which uses blood flow to measure brain activity.
The men were then asked to examine 36 pairs of eyes, half of which were men and the other half were women and to guess what the emotion was the people in the pictures were feeling.
They were asked to choose two words, such as distrustful or terrified to describe the eye's emotion - as they were shown photographs that depicted positive, neutral and negative emotions.
Schiffer found that men took longer and had seriously more trouble guessing the correct emotion from the picture's of women's eyes.
The study also found that men's brains activated differently when looking at women's eyes as opposed to men according to NBC News.
Men's amygdala, the region tied to emotion, empathy and fear activated in a stronger way when men looked at other men's eyes.
Other parts of men's brains tied to emotion didn't activate when looking at women's eyes according to Shiffer.
Overall, the findings indicate that men cannot read women's emotions as well as men's - at least by looking at their eyes.
However, the researchers are not clear yet on exactly why this is the case.
One possibility is that men are culturally conditioned to pay less attention to women's emotional signals while another could be part of our evolutionary history.
“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. - Daily Mail