To the gentlemen – how many times have you tried to understand your sister(s), partner, female colleague or friend being upset about something you can’t quite understand? Wondering what’s going on in their mind and why you ended up in that situation in the first place? To ladies – how many times, when complaining to your female friends about something that your brother (s), partner, male colleague or friend did/said you have heard back “Don’t get upset darling. Men’s brain works differently!”.
Is that true? Some people believe so. In a great talk about male and female brains Mark Gungor explains that the male brain is highly compartmentalized. It is made of boxes, like the “work” box, the “friends” box, the “family” box, the “partner” box. And these boxes do not touch each other. At all. Lol. On the other hand, areas of the female brain are all well connected. So while they are at work they think about the partner and while with the partner they concern about having to spend more time with friends and while with friends they worry about work. No ways to stop the cycle. At least females can multi-task though. However, recent studies have shown that there is not such a thing of male brain and female brain. Magnetic resonance imaging of several individuals showed that the brain is actually a mosaic of features that are common in females and features that are common in males.
What about emotions then? Despite my personal experience in a family where my dad is the emotional one and my mum is as hard as a rock, it is often a stereotype that women are more emotional than men. It was really controversial when the Nobel laureate Tim Hunt said to an audience full of scientists and science journalist that one of the problems of “girls” working in science is that they cry. Not surprisingly that comment caused a sexist issue and a reaction from female scientists.
Now I don’t want to get into this debate (admitting that I am the one that cries on the workplace, or everywhere else I feel like crying for that matter), but I want rather address the following questions. As emotions arise in the brain (see my previous post), and the brains are fundamentally similar in males and females, is it fair to say that men and women are from two different emotional planets? Are really females more emotional than males?
Some research has shown that women are better than men in talking about emotions as they have a larger area of the brain devoted to speech and language. Moreover, men have a different public display of emotions that comes from social “rules”. Indeed, boys are often told to toughen up and not to cry to not show weakness, while girls are usually allowed to cry and express their feelings. Finally, it appears that males are worse at recognizing someone else’s emotion. If presented with sensory cues (visual or auditory), females perform better than males at recognizing what emotion is linked to that stimulus. Of course these are all large group studies with a big space for individual variation.
But if you were wondering whether male and female emotions are different at a biological level, if males and females are from two completely different emotional planets as the stereotypes wants us to think, once again the answer to this potential gender difference is no. Interestingly, research shows that there is no significant difference between males and females in their responses to emotionally evocative stimuli when looking both at the level brain activity and at the autonomic nervous system (by measuring skin conductance and heart rate).
In conclusions, emotions are fundamentally the same in Mars and Venus. Whether you want to recognize them, show them and talk about them or not is another story!!
More material:
Mark Gungor’s talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ9L9YBJkk8
Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic; Joel et al., 2015.
Dr LaFrance’s talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxSR9U_LbSw
Gender differences in identifying emotions from auditory and visual stimuli; Waaramaa 2016.
Let's talk about emotions 