If you’ve ever gotten frustrated because you were sharing your feelings with your boyfriend and he just sort of shut down, he might not be as callous as you think. Clamming up during serious emotional discussions and arguments could be tied to a dip in activity in the empathy regions of the male brain, a 2010 study found.
The key component, according to researchers, has to do with stress. The more stressed out a guy is, the more likely he is to check out or disengage when it comes to other people’s feelings. He’s basically on emotional overload, and his brain literally goes on vacation.
A study found that the brains of stressed-out men are wired to shut down when tasked with handling other people’s feelings.
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Men have been on the receiving end of a whole lot of scorn in recent years over their lack of emotional intelligence. Whether it’s not talking about their own emotions or avoiding relationship talks with loved ones, it’s become a hot button gender dividing discussion, especially in light of the male loneliness epidemic.
There might be more at play than just the societal blame game that seems so prevalent nowadays, however. Men’s brains are actually wired differently when it comes to processing emotions.
Researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of Texas found that men under stress who were shown pictures of angry faces had reduced activity in the parts of the brain that handle understanding other people’s feelings. The brains of women, on the other hand, had the opposite response: heightened activity in the brain regions responsible for empathy and processing other people’s facial expressions.
“Experiencing acute stress can affect subsequent activity and interactions in brain regions in opposite ways for males and females,” lead author Mara Mather, director of the Emotion and Cognition Lab at USC, said in a statement. “Under stress, men tend to withdraw socially while women seek emotional support.”
The study confirmed that there are gendered differences in brain activity regarding the processing of others’ emotions, but the reasons why are still unclear.
AOL’s mental health expert, Dr. Daniel Carlat, cautioned against making too much of the findings. “I tend to be extremely skeptical of these functional imaging studies,” he told AOL Health. “We have only the vaguest idea of what it actually means when specific brain regions light up, and the research is in its infancy. So I generally ignore these kinds of studies.”
Mather and her colleagues conducted several tests suggesting that under extreme stress, men’s brains responded much less to certain facial expressions, namely those of fear and anger, than women’s brains did. When looking at the faces, both males and females showed activity in the fusiform face area of the brain, which processes basic visual stimuli. Men and women also registered a response in the regions used for interpreting facial expressions.
Simply put, men absolutely have the capacity for empathy; it’s just when dealing with a highly stressful situation that issues arise, but it’s unclear, according to the researchers and Dr. Carlat, whether that’s learned behavior or innate.
Aucte stress needs to be present in order for the male brain to shut down when it comes to dealing with other people’s feelings.
Branislav Nenin | Shutterstock
When they were in an acute state of stress, men’s brains had diminished activity both in the fusiform face region and in the portions that help people understand what facial expressions mean. The same brain regions became more responsive in women who were under severe stress while looking at the pictures of faces.
“These are the first findings to indicate that sex differences in the effects of stress on social behavior extend to one of the most basic social transactions—processing someone else’s facial expression,” said Mather.
The scientists manipulated participants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol using a measure known as the cold pressor stress test. Stressed men and women were as skilled as the subjects in the control group at remembering the faces, according to the authors.
Though Carlat takes issue with the scientists’ methodology, he said the results confirm what previous research has shown. “We have known through other psychological studies that men, on the average, are less empathic and less emotionally tuned in to others than women,” he said. “This study appears to reinforce this well-known finding.”
Obviously, if you’re having a serious relationship discussion and your guy checks out, this study isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card, so to speak. However, if you need to discuss something sensitive with your guy, it might serve you best to save that conversation when he’s feeling relaxed and less stressed.
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