Women often complain that their partners are not romantic enough. This raises the question: how romance is recognized and evaluated in a love relationship? However, there has been essentially no empirical research bearing on this issue. The present set of studies examined possible gender differences in perceptions of romance and the associated neural mechanisms in Chinese college students. In Study 1, 303 participants (198 women, 105 men) were administrated a questionnaire consisting of 60 sentences and required to rate the romance level of each sentence. Results showed higher rating scores in males than females for low romance items, but not for high or medium romance items. In Study 2, 69 participants (37 women, 32 men) were recruited to judge the degree of romance in sentences presented on a computer screen one by one. Compared with females, males again showed higher scores and responded more slowly only to low romance items. In Study 3, 36 participants (18 women, 18 men) currently in love with someone were scanned with functional MRI while they did the romance judgment task from Study 2. Compared with females, greater brain activation was found for males in the frontal lobe, precentral gyrus, precuneus and parahippocampal gyrus for low romance items. The results provide the first piece of evidence for gender differences in romance perception, suggesting enhanced cognitive processing in males when evaluating the degree of romance in romantic scenes.
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