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Topic: Women come from Venus, Men from Mars (Read 1281 times) |
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Hermit
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Women come from Venus, Men from Mars
« on: 2002-07-23 04:44:56 » |
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Women, Men Use Different Parts of Brain to Remember
Source: Yahoo News
References: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2002;10.1073/pnas162356599.
Authors: Linda Carroll
Dated: 2002-07-22
Refer also: Female Brain Wired for Emotion
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women and men use different parts of their brains to commit emotional events to memory, the results of a new study suggest.
The study also found that women are better than men at recalling emotion-tinged images, according to the report published in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( news - web sites).
To discover how gender affects the way people store emotional memories, researchers from Stanford University in California scanned the brains of 12 men and 12 women.
While in the scanner, each study participant looked at a series of 96 images, the content of which ranged from dull to intensely emotional.
Included in the group of emotional images were photos of an autopsy, a mutilated body, angry people and cemeteries, Turhan Canli, now an assistant professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, told Reuters Health in an interview.
The men and women were also asked to rate on a scale of zero to three how "emotionally intense" the image was.
Three weeks later, the study participants came back to the lab and viewed the same 96 images along with 48 new ones. Then the researchers asked the men and women to note whether any of the 144 images were familiar to them.
Men and women remembered dull pictures equally well. But when it came to emotion-charged images, women were more likely than men to remember, the investigators found.
First the researchers looked at which brain areas were active when a person viewed an image that gave rise to an intensely emotional reaction. In both men and women, several areas of the brain, including the left side of the amygdala--a small almond-shaped brain structure known to be involved in fear and emotional response--lit up.
Then Canli and his colleagues looked to see which areas of the brain were involved in committing an image to memory. Here the men and women differed, Canli said. In women, the left side of the amygdala again shone bright on the scans. But in men, it was the right side.
"My hunch is that the psychological processes that have to do with making an emotional evaluation after looking at the picture and recollecting it may be different in women than in men," Canli said. "We noticed that many activated sites were in the left side of the brain in women. The left side of the brain is associated with language use. The women subjects could have talked to themselves about what the story was behind the pictures."
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Women come from Venus, Men from Mars
« Reply #1 on: 2002-07-23 04:48:21 » |
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Study: Female Brain Wired for Emotion
Source: Yahoo News
Authors: Paul Recer, AP Science Writer
Dated: 2002-07-22
Refer also: Women, Men Use Different Parts of Brain to Remember
WASHINGTON (AP) - Matrimonial lore says husbands never remember marital spats and wives never forget. A new study suggests a reason: Women's brains are wired both to feel and to recall emotions more keenly than the brains of men.
A team of psychologists tested groups of women and men for their ability to recall or recognize highly evocative photographs three weeks after first seeing them and found that the women's recollections were 10 percent to 15 percent more accurate.
The study, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( news - web sites), also used MRIs to image the subjects' brains as they were exposed to the pictures. It found that the women's neural responses to emotional scenes were much more active than the men's.
Turhan Canli, an assistant professor of psychology at State University of New York Stony Brook, said the study shows that a woman's brain is better organized to perceive and remember emotions.
"The wiring of emotional experience and the coding of that experience into memory is much more tightly integrated in women than in men," said Canli, the lead author of the study. "A larger percentage of the emotional stimuli used in the experiment were remembered by women than by men."
Other authors of the study are John E. Desmond, Zuo Zhao and John D. E. Gabrieli, all of Stanford University.
The findings are consistent with earlier research that found differences in the workings of the minds of women and men, said Diane F. Halpern, director of the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children and a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California.
Halpern said the study "makes a strong link between cognitive behavior and a brain structure that gets activated" when exposed to emotional stimuli.
"It advances our understanding of the link between cognition and the underlying brain structures," she said. "But it doesn't mean that those are immutable, ... that they can't change with experience."
Halpern said the study also supports earlier findings that women, in general, have a better autobiographical memory for anything, not just emotional events.
She said the study supports the folkloric idea that a wife has a truer memory for marital spats than does her husband.
"One reason for that is that it has more meaning for women and they process it a little more," said Halpern. "But you can't say that we've found the brain basis for this, because our brains are constantly changing."
In the study, Canli and his colleagues individually tested the emotional memory of 12 women and 12 men using a set of pictures. Some of the pictures were ordinary, and others were designed to evoke strong emotions.
Each of the subjects viewed the pictures and graded them on a three-point scale ranging from "not emotionally intense" to "extremely emotionally intense."
As the subjects viewed the pictures, images were being taken of their brains using magnetic resonance imaging. This measures neural blood flow and can identify portions of the brain that are active.
Canli said women and men had distinctively different emotional responses to the same photos. For instance, the men would see a gun and call it neutral, but for women it would be "highly, highly negative" and evoke strong emotions.
Neutral pictures showed such things as a fireplug, a book case or an ordinary landscape.
The pictures most often rated emotionally intense showed dead bodies, gravestones and crying people. A picture of a dirty toilet prompted a strong emotional response, especially from the women subjects, Canli said.
All the test subjects returned to the lab three weeks later and were surprised to learn that they would now be asked to remember the pictures they had seen. Canli said they were not told earlier that they would be asked to recall pictures from the earlier session.
In a memory test tailored for each person, they were asked to pick out pictures that they earlier rated as "extremely emotionally intense." The pictures were mixed among 48 new pictures. Each image was displayed for less than three seconds.
"For pictures that were highly emotional, men recalled around 60 percent and women were at about 75 percent," said Canli.
Canli said the study may help move science closer to finding a biological basis to explain why clinical depression is much more common in women than in men.
Canli said a risk factor for depression is rumination, or dwelling on a memory and reviewing it time after time. The study illuminates a possible biological basis for rumination, he said.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Better loving through chemistry
« Reply #2 on: 2002-08-08 23:25:45 » |
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Better loving through chemistry
Why do guys sulk after a fight with their girlfriends instead of talking the problem to death? It's the hormone, stupid!
Source: Salon.com: Health
Authors: Amy O'Connor
Dated: 2000-09-27
Noticed By: Limbic
Psychologists think they have an explanation -- finally -- for why men withdraw into solitary silence in response to stress or anger. The latest theory zeros in on oxytocin, a hormone previously thought to do little more than trigger milk flow in pregnant women. The new research is considered a breakthrough in our understanding of human stress.
But it also marks a broader shift in psychology, away from social explanations for human behavior. Burned by their postmillennial status as "soft" scientists unable to prescribe antidepressants, psychologists are turning from their field's humanistic roots and toward biochemical and genetic research. The unwillingness of insurance companies to pay for unlimited psychotherapy is also spurring the change.
"Neural ailments, chemical imbalances and the legitimate and illegitimate use of drugs is occupying the time of more psychologists," says Ronald B. Evans, Ph.D., professor of psychology at East Carolina University in North Carolina. "We are leaving the field as a social science."
Until the oxytocin study, most evolutionary and cognitive psychology focused on sexual behavior. MIT's Steven Pinker, for example, defended President Clinton's philandering by explaining that he, like all males, is cognitively hard-wired to impregnate as many females as possible, thus ensuring species survival. David Buss, author of "The Evolution of Desire," cites genetic evidence for the male impulse to pair with younger, more fertile women, while women seek older males because of their greater earning power. The oxytocin hypothesis of women as nurturing caregivers and men as emotionless warriors suggests that evolutionary theorists are moving beyond a carnal focus to find chemical bases for all behavior, from why men pout to why even employed women take on all the child care.
This is distressing to anyone who believes that human behavior is governed by something higher, more mysterious, more and peculiarly human, than genes and hormones. Without social explanations, or even a social context into which to fit their findings, evolutionary psychologists promote friction between the sexes. Even more troubling, their research proposes no hope of change.
The study, published last month in the journal Psychological Review, argues that women's higher levels of oxytocin, a mood regulator released by the pituitary gland, causes them to seek social interaction to relieve stress. This newly coined "tend and befriend" response evolved, they say, from female primates genetically coded to protect their young. To this day it contrasts with the solitary, wound-licking behavior familiar to anyone who has ever shared a home or office with a man.
Low levels of oxytocin, according to the study, explains why my boyfriend spends hours in his "music room" strumming the guitar when we have a fight, forgoing food and even the bathroom with his torturous pouting. I, on the other hand, will make a round robin of phone calls to my girlfriends, seeking an ear, advice, anything to break the isolation. Because oxytocin operates synergistically with other sex hormones, his behavior is supported by testosterone, while mine is supported by estrogen. Theoretically, when my estrogen levels dip after menopause, we'll both spend more time sulking and our phone bills will be lower.
"We began this study in 1998 with the hypothesis that men and women responded differently to stress," says Laura Cousino Klein, a professor of bio-behavioral health at Pennsylvania State University and one of the study's authors. "That was quite controversial." It was previously assumed that everyone displayed a "fight or flight" response to any kind of stress, from a nasty day at the office to being held up at gunpoint.
Women have traditionally been left out of human stress studies because researchers assumed that menstrual mood swings would muck up any results. But since 1995, when the federal government mandated broad representation of both sexes in research grants -- and made more money available for research on women -- psychologists have shifted their focus. The oxytocin study, one of the largest of stress, examined thousands of studies on male and female humans, apes and rats -- even deer and moles.
"There will now be a surge of new research in this field," says Brian Lewis, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University who specializes in stress.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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