When Bad People Are Punished, Men Smile (but Women Don't)

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/science/19revenge.html

When Bad People Are Punished, Men Smile (but Women

Don't)

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

ROME, - In " Don " Lord Byron wrote, " Sweet

is revenge - especially to

women. " But a study released Wednesday, bolstered

by magnetic resonance

imaging, suggests that men may be the more

natural avengers.

In the study, when male subjects witnessed people

they perceived as bad

guys being zapped by a mild electrical shock,

their M.R.I. scans lit up in

primitive brain areas associated with reward.

Their brains' empathy centers

remained dull.

Women watching the punishment, in contrast,

showed no response in centers

associated with pleasure. Even though they also

said they did not like the

bad guys, their empathy centers still quietly

glowed.

The study seems to show for the first time in

physical terms what many

people probably assume they already know: that

women are generally more

empathetic than men, and that men take great

pleasure in seeing revenge

exacted.

Men " expressed more desire for revenge and seemed

to feel satisfaction when

unfair people were given what they perceived as

deserved physical

punishment, " said Dr. Tania Singer, the lead

researcher, of the Wellcome

Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University

College London.

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" It's not who's right and who's wrong that matters so much... it's how people

treat the ones they believe are wrong. " - Unknown

" The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human

beings who are manipulated by only a few heads. " - Carl Jung

" We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon,

And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. "

Joni

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