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新概念英语第3册阅读常见话题：女性心思不易猜

8. 女性心思不易猜

New research has proven that men had twice as much trouble understanding women's emotions from their eyes as those of other men.

一项新的研究表明，男性猜测女性的心思要比猜测男性的心思困难两倍。

Gathering 22 men between the ages of 21 and 52, researchers put them into a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which uses blood flow to measure brain activity.

研究者们对 22 名男性受测者进行研究，其年龄在 21 岁至 52 岁。研究者将他们安排在一个功能性磁共振成像扫描仪中，通过血流测量他们的大脑活跃程度。

The men were then asked to examine 36 pairs of eyes, half of which were men?s eyes and the other half were women?s eyes, and to guess what emotion the people in the pictures were feeling.

随后，这些受测者被要求看照片中的 36 双眼睛，并猜测照片中的人有什么心思，其中男性和女性的眼睛各占一半。

They were also asked to choose words, such as distrustful or terrified, to describe the eyes' emotion--as they were shown photographs that depicted positive, neutral and negative emotions.

这些照片分别呈现出了或积极、或中立、或消极的情感。受测者在看照片时还被要求选择词汇来描述眼神所传达的情感，如疑惑、恐惧等。

Researchers found that these men took longer and had seriously more trouble guessing the correct emotion from the pictures of women's eyes. And their brains were activated differently when they looked at women's eyes as opposed to men?s eyes.

研究者发现，这些男性受测者要通过照片中女性的眼神猜对她们的心情会用时更久，也更费力。而且在他们分别看女性及男性的眼神时，大脑的激活程度也有所不同。

According to the research, men's amygdala, the region tied to emotion, empathy and fear, was activated in a stronger way when men looked at other men's eyes.

大脑中的杏仁体主管情感、共鸣及恐惧。研究显示，当男子看其他男性的眼神时，其杏仁体的激活程度更为剧烈。

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.

这一研究结果表明，男人无法像读懂男人的心思那样读懂女人的心思，至少从观察她们的眼神来说是这种情况。然而，研究者们对这一现象至今仍未有明确的解释。点滴积累 >empathy [n.共鸣]