While the old stereotype says that women are sensitive, men often make the mistake of saying the wrong thing because they don’t realize when someone is upset or upset.
But a study suggests there may be some truth to this, showing that women are actually better at detecting other people’s emotions.
The study looked at more than 300,000 people in 57 countries, and each was shown 36 blinked eye pictures as part of a “mind reading in the eyes” test.
These subjects were asked to choose the correct emotion for the person whose eyes were photographed from a list of four emotions.
These include overt emotions such as fear and confusion, as well as illusory emotions such as embarrassment, irritability, anxiety, and pleasure.
And in most countries, women scored, on average, better than men at accurately detecting emotions.
David Greenberg, a resident of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and an honorary research fellow at the University of Cambridge, who led the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said: “Our results provides some of the first evidence. which is a well-known phenomenon – that women, on average, are more empathetic than men.” Men – exist in a wide variety of countries around the world. We can only say this with confidence using a very large dataset.”
The study is the largest looking at ‘theory of mind’, which means cognitive empathy, or the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and imagine what they are thinking or feeling.
Women fared better than men in this regard from age 16 to age 70—the highest age range examined by the study.
Researchers suggest that biological and social factors play a role.
Researchers have found a decrease in empathy in women after age 50, which may be related to hormonal changes associated with menopause, but more research is needed to understand if this plays any role.
According to the test results, men’s ability to empathize begins to decline after the age of 58.
The results of an empathy test conducted in English were confirmed by test results from a separate group of people who performed the same task in eight other languages.
It has also been verified in more than three groups, including more than 7,000 people.
The ability to empathize with others varies from person to person and is partly genetic, but is particularly difficult for people with mental health problems such as dementia, autism, and schizophrenia and personality disorders.
Source: Daily Mail
Source: Arabic RT
