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Girls Wired To Fear Dangerous Animals
Foot-in-Mouth writes "New Scientist reports that girls are more "primed" to fear spiders and snakes, compared to boys. Infant boys and girls were shown pairs of images, a fearful and a happy object (such as a spider and a flower), measuring the boys' and girls' dwell times on the images. And in another similar test, normally happy objects (such as a flower) were given a fearful face and fearful objects were given a happy face. The results of these two tests suggested to the researcher that girls are not wired to fear spiders, for example, but rather girls are wired to more quickly learn to fear dangerous animals.
The researcher, David Rakison at CMU, 'attributes the difference to behavioural differences between men and women among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. An aversion to spiders may help women avoid dangerous animals, but in men evolution seems to have favoured more risk-taking behaviour for successful hunting.'
This reminds one of men's obsession with video games. Will game designers use this information to tweak video games for gender, either to make the games more or less frightening?"
Foot in mouth is right. The title and the summary contradict.
It seems foolish to base a scientific study off of some scientist's ability to objectively judge facial expressions in infants.
That's not what the study measured. It used quantifiable criteria. The conclusions are debatable, but you have to read the study before you're entitled to an opinion.
That's not science.
That's not reading.
Screaming when in fear alerts the tribe to danger and the higher pitch of their voices seems like it would travel better than a guttural manly tone..
Actually the higher pitch is better because it is less omnidirectional (i.e. you can tell where it's coming from) than a lower pitch. This is why police/fire/medical vehicles have high pitch sirens, so you can tell where they are coming from easier.
Mice bite
If you are catching a mouse in a cardboard box with your bare hand then the cornered mouse will eventually bite. But in an open land any sane mouse will do its best to run away. Attempts to bite a creature 100x larger than the mouse will only force it to come closer to the danger, and most likely will not be effective.