By Tia Ghose, LiveScience
It’s a cliché that men just don’t understand women.
Now, new research suggests men really do struggle to read women’s emotions — at least from their eyes.
The research, published Wednesday (April 10) in the journal PLOS ONE, showed that men had twice as much trouble deciphering women’s emotions from images of their eyes compared with those of men. Parts of the male brain tied to emotion also didn’t activate as strongly when the men looked at women’s eyes.
While pop culture claims that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, both sexes are pretty similar. Yet despite the genders’ psychological overlap, a few small studies in men have suggested they have trouble “mind-reading” and guessing what women are thinking and feeling. For instance, one study found that men interpret friendliness from women as sexual come-ons.
