Cued up: men more likely to confuse friendliness with come-on

(CBC) - A smile may just be a smile - though college-age men are more likely to think otherwise, suggests new research.

A study by Indiana University and Yale researchers found that college-age men are more likely than women of the same age to confuse a person's body language and facial expressions, misconstruing them as sexual when in fact they're just friendly.

They found 12 per cent of men and 8.7 per cent of women inaccurately identified images of friendly people as "sexually interested."

And when presented with an image of a sexually interested person, there was even more confusion, with 37.8 per cent of men saying the images represented "friendly" women and 31.9 per cent of the women reporting the same.

Participants were also asked to rate whether the people in the images were "sad" or "rejecting," traits that along with "friendly" and "sexually interested" were more likely to be misidentified if the person in the image was wearing provocative rather than conservative clothing.

The authors theorize that women are more adept at interpreting non-verbal cues due to their greater emotional range. They do not believe that the differences stem from men oversexualizing situations.

"Relative to women, men did not oversexualize the image set in our study," said lead author Coreen Farris, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU Bloomington, in a release.

"Both men and women were reluctant to state that ambiguous cues were 'sexual interest.' In fact, men and women utilized nearly identical thresholds for the degree of sexual interest that must be perceived before they were willing to go out on a limb and state that the nonverbal cues were sexual in nature," said Farris.

Two hundred and eighty heterosexual men and women participated in the study, which is published in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science.