Men are notoriously insensitive to the emotional world around them. At least, that is the stereotype peddled by a thousand women’s magazines. And a study at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, confirms that men are, in deed ,less sensitive to emotion than women ,with one important and suggestive exception. Men are acutely sensitive to the anger of other men.
Mark Williams and Jason Mattingley looked at the way a person’s affects his or her response to emotionally charged facial expressions. People from all cultures agree on what six basic expressions of emotion look like. Whether the face before you is expressing anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness or surprise seems to be recognised universally--which suggests that the expressions involved are innate, rather than learned.
Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley showed the participants in their study photographs of these emotional expressions in mixed sets of either four or eight. They asked the participants to look for a particular sort of expression, and measured the amount of time it took them to find it. The researchers found ,in agreement with previous studies, that both men and women identified angry expressions most quickly. But they also found that anger was more quickly identified on a male face than a female one.
Moreover, most participants could find an angry face just ms quickly when it was mixed in a group of eight photographs as when it was part of a group of four. This suggests that something in the brain is attuned (使协调，使一致) to picking out angry expressions, and that it is especially concerned about angry men. Also, this highly tuned ability seems more important to males than females, since the two researchers found that men picked out the angry expressions faster than women did.
Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley suspect the reason for this is that being able to spot an angry individual quickly has a survival advantage--and, since anger is more likely to turn into lethal violence in men than in women, the ability to spot angry males quickly is particularly valuable.
The ability to spot quickly that a male is in a foul mood would thus have great survival value. It would allow the sharp-witted time to choose appeasement (缓和) ,detente or possibly even pre-emptive (先发制人的) attack. And, if it is right, this study also confirms a lesson learned by generations of bar-mom tough guys and schoolyard bullies: if you want attention, get angry. When asked to look for a certain expression, both es