Community | July 10, 2008 | 7 comments

She's just not that into you -- or is she?

source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/07/10/shes.not.that.into.you/index.html?iref=24hours

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SilenceNoMore
When it comes to women, says Mark Tardif, 44, sometimes it's hard to tell what they're thinking. Last year, the college administrator from Waterville, Maine, met an attractive woman at a conference and was having a great conversation over a glass of wine.

Then something unexpected happened: "She undid the plastic clasp holding her hair in a bun, letting her blond hair fall, then flipped it side to side."

Tardif was confused. Could it really be a sign of interest, he thought? No, he finally decided. "I told myself to get real and put it aside," he says.

And so when the evening was over, there was no lingering, just a polite good night.

"She stood there silent, glass of wine in her hands, with a look of puzzlement on her face," he recalls. "As the doors closed, it hit me like a ton of bricks that she was shocked that I hadn't followed her back to her room. The next day was awkward between us."

According to researchers at Indiana University and Yale University, Tardif isn't the only man flying blind. Women are better than men at interpreting facial expressions and body language, at least when it comes to images of women, according to a study published in the April issue of the journal "Psychological Science."

In the study, researchers tested 280 heterosexual male and female students at Indiana University in 2006 and 2007, asking them to sort 280 photos of women (all pictures were full-length shots of fully clothed subjects) into one of one of four categories -- friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting.

Men who viewed images of women misidentified 12 percent of the images as sexually interested, the study found, while women mistook 8.7 percent of images.

Researchers chalk it up to women's more developed ability to read others' signals, and men's tendency to oversexualize social situations or miss the message entirely.
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