When a woman cries her man’s face either goes blank or shows panic.
“From childhood on, males learn that acting cool and hiding their fears are the unwritten laws of masculinity,” writes Louann Brizendine, MD, in her book The Male Brain. By age 13 or so, as his testosterone levels surge, looking cool becomes extra important, even essential, because then he looks confident. Boys practice keeping their emotions hidden from an early age and have trained their face muscles into a mask to hide fear from other males.
Face muscles are controlled by the brain’s emotional circuits. Researchers used electrodes on smile muscles and on scowl muscles of men and women and recorded electrical activity as volunteers looked at photos chosen for emotional content.
The scientists were surprised to discover the men, after seeing an emotional face for just one fifth of a second, so briefly that it was still unconscious, were more emotionally reactive than the women.
But then, at 2.5 seconds, well into the range of conscious processing, the men’s facial muscles became less emotionally responsive that the women’s.
The women’s facial muscles became more emotionally responsive after 2.5 seconds.
So what does this tell us? Well, scientists are suggesting that we have been in training since childhood. Men have trained themselves to automatically turn off or disguise facial emotions from boyhood to be acceptable among men. Females, whose Mirror Neuron System stays on longer, express empathy and mirror back the emotions through smiles or frowns and even exaggerate the facial expression, and are more interactive in the empathy stage.
So a blank face may be preferable or even an essential trained reflex for men amongst men, but in personal relationships with women it is easily misinterpreted as lack of interest or caring.
So going out of empathy mode into fix-it mode fast is normal and feels natural for men while building and maintaining empathy over a longer time before going into fix-it mode is normal and feels caring and natural for women.
This is estrogen and testosterone in action. When will we accept that yin is meant to be yin and yang is meant to be yang. They are not interchangeable. The opposites polarities, negative and positive, are essential to move energy in cells in the body for life to exist.
Why would we expect males and females to express emotions in the same way? That expectation is a mystery to me. How about you? What do you think?
Cheers
Anna
anna@annamcrobert.com.au