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 When it comes to stress, men and women cope differently
With apologies to John Gray, bestselling author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, you don’t have to look very far to discover the root cause of the differences between men and women.
In fact, a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine conducted a study on 16 healthy males and 16 healthy females that suggests that gender differences, particularly around how men and women cope with stress, can be traced to the brain. To conduct the tests, the researchers administered functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans before, during and after undergoing a challenging arithmetic task. During the task, the researchers put stress on the subjects by asking for quicker responses and correcting wrong answers.
The findings showed that the fMRI results were different for each gender. The limbic system, a part of the brain primarily involved in emotion, was activated when the women were under stress. In contrast, the men showed an increase in cerebral blood flow in the right prefrontal cortex and a decrease in the left orbitofrontal cortex.
In laymen’s terms, women respond to stress by nurturing, what UCLA psychology professor Shelly E. Taylor terms “tending and befriending.” Men more commonly respond to stress by triggering their fight-or-flight mechanism; they either fight back or bottle up the stress and escape.
Perhaps John Gray wasn’t so far off after all. However, instead of men being from Mars and women Venus, it might be more accurate to say that men live in the Stone Age, women in the 21st century.
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