That Upper class people generally have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better jobs than people from lower social classes, but that doesn’t mean they’re more skilled at everything. A new study finds, surprisingly, that lower class people are better at reading the emotions of others.
The researchers were inspired by observing that, for lower class people, success depends more on how much they can rely on other individuals. For example, if you can’t afford to buy support services, you have to rely on your neighbors or relatives to watch the kids while you’re busy.
One experiment researched on volunteers who worked at a university: some had graduated from college and others had not. Researchers used the educational level as an indicator（标志）for social classes. The volunteers did a test of emotion perception（感知）, in which they were instructed to look at pictures of faces and indicate which emotions each face was displaying. People with more education performed worse on the task than people with less education.
In another study, university students who were of higher social status had a more difficult time accurately（准确）reading the emotions of a stranger.
These results suggest that people of upper-class status aren’t very good at recognizing the emotions other people are feeling. This is because they remember their upper status and they think they can solve their problems without relying on others.
In the third experiment, people were made to feel that they were at a lower social class than they actually were, and they got better at reading emotions.
“The differences between upper-class people and lower-class people are not something ingrained（根深蒂固的）,” Kraus says. “It’s the cultural environment leading to them.” This work helps show that the traditional image of the classes is wrong. “It’s not true that a lower-class person, no matter what kind of person, is going to be less intelligent than an upper-class person. It’s all about the social environment the person lives in, and the specific challenges the person faces. If you can change the environment even temporarily, social class differences in lots of behaviors can be removed.”
小题1:According to the passage, when lower-class people meet problems, they tend to ______.
A．turn to others
B．work even harder
C．feel more frustrated
D．learn from upper-class people小题2:Why did people perform better in emotion perception in the third experiment?
A．Because they became less independent.
B．Because they didn’t know they were cheated.
C．Because they felt they must ask for help from other.
D．Because they were made to understand lower-class people.小题3:What does the passage mainly talk about?
A．Upper-class people are not skilled at everything.
B．Upper-class people have trouble recognizing others’ emotion.
C．Lower-class people need to be given more employment opportunities.
D．There are many differences between upper-class people and lower-class people.
