Why Women are More Emotional Than Men: Emotions are Processed Differently

When it comes to emotions, men and women act differently. Now, scientists have discovered that men and women may actually process emotions differently.

Most people cite women as being more emotional than men. Past studies have also shown that women consider emotional events as more emotionally stimulating than men do, and that emotions can influence our memory; the more emotional a situation is, the more likely we are to remember it. Intrigued by this, researchers decided to see if women actually processed emotions differently than men.

The researchers examined 3,398 volunteers from four sub-trials. They found that women rated emotional content image-especially negative content-as more emotionally stimulating than men. In the case of neutral images, though, there were no gender-related differences.

What was more interesting was that during a subsequent memory tests, women could freely recall significantly more images than men. In fact, the women's advantage seemed to indicate that gender-dependent differences in emotional processing and memory are due to different mechanisms.

The findings reveal why women may be more emotionally expressive than men. In addition, they provide a better understanding of gender-specific differences in information processing. This knowledge is important since many neuropsychiatric illnesses also exhibit gender-related differences.

This study shows a bit more about emotions-in both men and women. This, in turn, could help further future studies.

The findings are published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

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