CTW: Appreciating Gender Differences: Emotions

Women are more likely to express their emotions 

• Men and women experience the same amount of emotion, but that women are more likely to express their emotions.  When measured with an affect intensity measure, women reported greater intensity of both positive and negative affect than men. Women also reported a more intense and more frequent experience of affect, joy, and love but also experienced more embarrassment, guilt, shame, sadness, anger, fear, and distress.
  
•  Experiencing pride was more frequent and intense for men than for women.[128] In imagined frightening situations, such as being home alone and witnessing a stranger walking towards your house, women reported greater fear. 
• Anger and Fear: Women also reported more fear in situations that involved "a male's hostile and aggressive behavior" (281)[128] In anger-eliciting situations, women communicated more intense feelings of anger than men. Women also reported more intense feelings of anger in relation to terrifying situations, especially situations involving a male protagonist.[133] Emotional contagion refers to the phenomenon of a person’s emotions becoming similar to those of surrounding people. Women have been reported to be more responsive to this.[134] 
• Women were found to be more facially expressive than men when it came to both positive and negative emotions. These researchers concluded that men and women experience the same amount of emotion, but that women are more likely to express their emotions
• Tear Glands: Women are known to have anatomically differently shaped tear glands than men as well as having more of the hormone prolactin, which is present in tear glands, as adults. While girls and boys cry at roughly the same amount at age 12, by age 18, women generally cry four times more than men, which could be explained by higher levels of prolactin.[73][139]
• Facial expressions: 
• In a study where researchers wanted to concentrate on nonverbal expressions by just looking at the eyebrows, lips, and the eyes, participants read certain cue cards that were either negative or positive and recorded the responses.
  
•  In the results of this experiment it is shown that feminine emotions happen more frequently and have a higher intensity in women than men. In relation to the masculine emotions, such as anger, the results are flipped and the women’s frequency and intensity is lower than the men’s.
•  Studies that measure facial expression by the use of electromyography recordings show that women are more adequately able to manipulate their facial expressions than men. Men, however can inhibit their expressions better than females when cued to do so. In the observer ratings women’s facial expressions are easier to read as opposed to men’s except for the expression of anger
• Amygdala :
• Women show a significantly greater activity in the left amygdala when encoding and remembering emotionally arousing pictures (such as mutilated bodies.)
• Men and women tend to use different neural pathways to encode stimuli into memory. While highly emotional pictures were remembered best by all participants in one study, as compared to emotionally neutral images, women remembered the pictures better than men. This study also found greater activation of the right amygdala in men and the left amygdala in women.
• On average, women use more of the left cerebral hemisphere when shown emotionally arousing images, while men use more of their right hemisphere. 
• Women also show more consistency between individuals for the areas of the brain activated by emotionally disturbing images.[144] One study of 12 men and 12 women found that more areas in the brains of women were highly activated by emotional imagery, though the differences may have been due to the upbringing of the test participants.[146] 
• Past events and Pain:
• When women are asked to think about past events that made them angry, they show activity in the septum in the limbic system; this activity is absent in males. In contrast, men's brains show more activity in the limbic system when asked to identify happy or sad male and female faces. 
•  In women, the limbic system, which is involved in the processing of emotions, shows greater activity in response to pain. In men, cognitive areas of the brain, which are involved in analytical processing, show higher activity in response to pain.[148] This indicates a connection between pain-responsive brain regions and emotional regions in women.

Mental Health
Men and women do not differ on their overall rates of psychopathology, however, certain disorders are more prevalent in women, and vice versa. Women have higher rates of anxiety and depression (internalizing disorders) and men have higher rates of substance abuse and antisocial disorders (externalizing disorders). It is believed that divisions of power and the responsibilities set upon each sex are critical to this predisposition. Namely, women earn less money than men do, they tend to have jobs with less power and autonomy, and women are more responsive to problems of people in their social networks. These three differences can contribute to women's predisposition to anxiety and depression. It is believed that socializing practices that encourage high self-regard and mastery would benefit the mental health of both men and women

Menstrual Cycle and Mood

• Researchers used MRI to study the brains of women who viewed a series of pictures and rated them as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. This test was repeated at different stages of the women's menstrual cycles.
• In the early follicular stage of the menstrual cycle, no areas of the women's brains showed significantly increased activation while viewing the pictures. But during the midpoint of their menstrual cycle, when hormone levels were higher, the women had increased activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain involved in processing emotional information, the researchers found
• Predicting where woman are in their menstrual cycle based on behavior alone
• A very interesting study from the 1930’s by a physician and a psychologist puts it all into perspective. The physician monitored the hormone states of women while the psychologist observed their behaviors. What they found was that the psychologist could predict, with amazing accuracy, where the women were in their menstrual cycles, based on behavior alone.
• They found that during the first half of the cycle, before ovulation, the women’s emotions and behaviors were more focused on the outside world—on creating and contributing outside of themselves. During ovulation the women were more content, relaxed, and allowed more help and care from others. After ovulation, during the premenstrual phase when estrogen was lowest and progesterone highest, the women were more focused internally, on their own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. 
• This study illustrates what we women have sensed for years: We feel, think, and even behave differently in accordance with the dialogue of our menstrual cycles.
• But this study also shows the wisdom of our female bodies. As author Christiane Northrup states, “I like to think of the first half of our cycles as the time when we are both biologically and psychologically preparing to give birth to someone or something outside of ourselves. In the second half of the cycles, we prepare to give birth to nothing less than ourselves”[4].
• Sure, our menstrual cycles can make our moods feel a little complicated. But if we learn about our body and listen to its wisdom, we will not only have the power to take charge of our emotional well-being, but we will appreciate the incredible power our beautiful female bodies possess."
• References : Emotions during Menstrual Cycle- womenshealth.about.com
  Emotions during Menstrual Cycle- Dr Christina Hebbert

Reaction to stress sending emotions in a whirl:
Reference: Women more prone to emotional stress than men 'because of sensitivity to hormone'

• Members of the fairer sex are more sensitive to a key stress hormone - with even small amounts sending their emotions into a whirl, research shows. 
• Men, in contrast, are relatively immune to even high amounts of the chemical.This perhaps explains why they often take a more laid-back view of potential crises - infuriating the women in their lives in the process.
• Researchers say the U.S. study could help explain the differences in the way men and women control their emotions.Women have higher rates of depression,post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety problems than men. The study focused on a stress hormone called corticotropinreleasing factor (CRF) which helps control the body's reaction to stress.
• CRF is known to play a role in human psychiatric conditions. Study leader Dr Rita Valentino, of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said: 'This is an animal study carried out on rats and we cannot say that the biological mechanism is the same in people. But researchers already know that CRF regulation is disrupted in stress-related psychiatric disorders, so this research may be relevant to the underlying human biology. This may help to explain why women are twice as vulnerable as men to stress-related disorders.
• In the study, brain cells of female rats were excited by doses of CRF that were too low to affect cells in male rats, the journal Molecular Psychiatry reports. Experiments showed that the hormone bound more tightly to brain cell proteins of stressed-out female rats, making them more sensitive to its effects. The male rats, however, were able to reduce levels of the protein, stopping the hormone from binding and reducing its effects on the brain.

Memory
The results from research on sex differences in memory are mixed and inconsistent, with some studies showing no difference, and others showing a female or male advantage.[80] Most studies have found no sex differences in short term memory, the rate of memory decline due to aging, or memory of visual stimuli.[80] Females have been found to have an advantage in recalling auditory and olfactory stimuli, experiences, faces, names, and the location of objects in space.[11][80] However, males show an advantage in recalling "masculine" events.
Also for females their memory is tied to their emotions hence they are able to recall events better than men.