Are there gender differences when it comes to processing emotions? This was the starting point of the research developed by the University of Basel (Switzerland) and the results of which are reported in the Journal of Neuroscience .
Previous studies have shown that women view events on an emotional level much more stimulating – emotionally speaking – than men. In addition, taking into account that emotions influence our memory since the more emotional the situation, the more likely we are to remember it, the scientists tried to find out if it was possible for women to outperform men in memory tests taking into account this circumstance.
Thus, they conducted an experiment with a total of 3,398 participants related to memory tests regarding neutral, negative and positive situations on an emotional level. Thus, women were able to remember much better than men when situations were especially negative, a circumstance that was repeated when it came to positive images. Women remembered positive situations in much better detail than men .
“This suggests that gender-dependent differences in emotional processing and memory are due to different mechanisms, ” explains Annette Milnik, co-author of the study.
While conducting the experiment, they monitored the brain activity of 696 subjects, discovering that, among women, brain activity skyrocketed when it was related to highly negatively charged emotional content. ” This result would support the common belief that women are emotionally more expressive than men, ” clarifies Klara Spalek, leader of the study.
Image credit: MCN, University of Basel
