Women, though typically exceptional at hiding their true feelings, are becoming outed by doctors.

New research shows that getting dumped can cause changes in women’s brains that are visible on MRI scans, the New York Daily News reported.

As February and the dreaded holiday for singles approaches, some females grow a little crazier than usual.

Girls with boyfriends ritually fear a hex will be put on their relationship just before Valentine’s Day while also anxiously anticipating gifts they will use as decoders of what their relationship truly means.

Some single girls typically dismiss the day as just an irrelevant Hallmark holiday not worth mentioning … as they mention it repeatedly.

And some girls who have just gotten out of a relationship, wish for just a day they can quietly creep into a hole in the earth.

The most common variety of the Valentine vixens are the quiet ones, the girls I thought to have the least alarming behavior.

Is it a female thing to have heavily guarded hearts or to hold on to baggage longer?

The more I thought about it, though there are always exceptions, women typically retain more psychological effects after break-ups than men.

And now medical science can physically see how much.

In a recent study, researchers examined the brain scans of 11 women aged between 18 and 40 who had been in a romantic relationship for at least six months, which had ended within the preceding 16 weeks. All the women who took part were experiencing problems recovering from the split, a risk factor for clinical depression.

When nine women particularly upset about a breakup were asked to think of ex-lovers, researchers found less activity in the parts of the brain associated with motivation and attention span. The area of the brain linked with sadness showed more activity.

Similarly, this could be seen when your recently dumped friend has a hard time focusing on the Real World plot line while plunging into a carton of Ben & Jerry’s or when she doesn’t have the motivation to leave the couch she has been laying on in the same pajamas she has worn for four days.

Women were chosen for the study because they “generally have higher levels of chronic strain with breakups than men do,” wrote Arif Najib and Jeffrey Lorberbaum, co-authors of the report, which appears in the latest issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

The researchers hope the study can help them to understand the brain’s basis for grief and how it can lead to depression.

Feeling Valentine blues may be common among girls, but this study indicates some behaviors deserve more attention than others.

The brain can be physically affected by emotions. Existing research suggests that women are two to three times more likely to develop depression than men and that the areas of the brain believed to be linked with depression appear to be more reactive in women than in men.

Although the report focuses on negatives, it was important in acknowledging difficulties faced by women. Najib wrote that grief is difficult to study because it does tend to wane as time passes.

You might not be able to spell it out in candy hearts, but feeling “true depression” over “true love” is a common feeling that can be helped and will fade with time.