Women just like men confused between friendliness and sexual advances
Globe and Mail
April 3, 2008
By Hayley Mick
New research to be published in the April issue of Psychological Science suggests university-aged men are more likely than their female peers to confuse friendly signals with sexual ones, and sexual ones with friendly ones.
In a Yale University and Indiana University study of 280 heterosexual, university-aged men and women, subjects were asked to arrange 280 photos of fully clothed women into four categories: friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting.
Men who viewed images of friendly women mistakenly labelled 12 per cent of those images as sexually interested. Women got it wrong 8.7 per cent of the time.
But both men and women fared even worse at realizing when women were sexually interested. Men mistakenly interpreted 37.8 per cent of the "sexually interested" images as "friendly," while women mislabeled about 32 per cent of those images.
"Both men and women were pretty hesitant to call anyone sexually interested," said Coreen Farris, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at Indiana University's department of psychological and brain sciences.
Read the entire story at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080403.wxlcues03/BNStory/lifeFamily/home
Learn more about IU's Department of Psychology at: http://bl-psy-appsrv.ads.iu.edu:8080/
