Can This Really Be True?

According to psychologists at the University of British Columbia, what turns women and men on is very different, certainly in two instances! One involves smiling and the other is the opposite, namely wearing a brooding sullen expression. 

A perspicacious journalist, Fiona MacRae, has tumbled on this research conducted on 1000 men and women and whose findings have been published in the Journal ‘Emotion’.

Consider this! For men looking to make a hit with women, were they to smile at one, it is most likely to be turn-off. However, give them a brooding sullen stare and, as like as not, they are hooked! Also bearing an expression of pride, or even shame, can win a woman over! One of the researchers posed the conclusion that for women, implicit in the proud exterior of a man maybe is taken as evidence of his ability to provide for a partner and children.

Yet for a women to forsake the smile and go for the sullen, brooding, proud look in the company of a man is a fool’s errand. For her to win the man, it seems a smile will carry a much higher chance of success. A submissive, vulnerable smile is seemingly recommended!

I confess I have never doubted – and I also cherish the difference between men and women, but hadn’t reckoned on this set of conclusions!  Now past the age when I should know better, I feel I must watch out for those moments in company when unwittingly I might display excessive pride in an achievement or sullen brooding over a failure! But I do lament that a simple smile to acknowledge the presence of a woman could actually disappoint her, and to a man might give him the wrong idea!

Good to start a New Year with tongue slightly in cheek!

Gerry Neale
www.squaringcircles.co.uk