Couples kiss at the base of the flag pole at the Zocalo square in downtown Mexico City January 17, 2013.
Couples kiss at the base of the flag pole at the Zocalo square in downtown Mexico City January 17, 2013. Reuters

Queensland scientists reckoned that they've proved women are better at empathy than men. The study was conducted by Professor Paul Frijters of the University of Queensland and Dr Cindy Mervin of Griffith University.

According to the Daily Telegraph, data was collected from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia, a household-based panel study involving more than 20,000 people across Australia. It took information from more than a thousand interviews with Australians. Looking into the data, the scientists came to the conclusion that the women are more likely to feel the emotional pain of their partners than the men.

Approximately 24 percent of the women had a tendency to experience the emotional pain of a negative event that affects their partner. The pain that they experienced was the same if the negative event happened to themselves. In the case of men, only 7 percent of them felt the pain of their partner in the same way as if it happened to them.

Mervin said that it was not that the men were unemotional or uncaring because they were strongly affected by what happened to themselves but not very emotional when it came to the feelings of their partner. He explained that the research found there was a spillover effect on events that happened to one person from the pain or joy that was caused by others. He added that negative as well as positive shocks affected other members of the family and probably even the neighbourhood.

Frijters said that they looked at people who had experienced negative shocks like the death of a friend, losing a job or becoming ill. They found that both men and women were almost equally affected by such shocks if it happened to themselves.

He explained that it was possible that the men were more affected by their roles and image as partners than by the actual feelings of their partner. He said that it was not clear if this was because of nature or nurture. He added that they could speculate but were not going to know the answer to that any time soon.