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I went to an interesting talk today, one of Indiana University’s themester activities. Steven Gaulin of UC Santa Barbara spoke about work he has done with William Lassek on the relationship between human brain size and sex differences in fat distribution. It’s a fascinating story. We women are fattier overall than men, and we tend [...]
A new fMRI study of 62 children suggests that the early lead girls have in language skills on average is based on differences in how language is processed in boys’ and girls’ brains. In the girls, the language-related areas of the brain were more active than in boys while they were completing spelling and writing [...]
This press release from Duke has some surprising news about a common variant of a gene that affects the availability of serotonin in the brain. Women who had experienced significant stress at some time in their lives and carried a shorter form of the gene showed more signs of depression than women who had the [...]
The stereotype is that women are the big talkers of the human species, but a recent set of meta-analyses of past research contradicts the stereotype. Overall men tend to talk a bit more than women, but the difference is small. In general, who talks more in a given situation depends on the context and the [...]
I’ve volunteered for a number of studies that people in the psychology department at Indiana University were working on, and also for a few that were being conducted by the Kinsey Institute. The psych experiments seem to involve a lot of time in tiny rooms watching words or photos flash by on a computer screen, [...]
I am, therefore I walk. Or is it “I think, therefore I walk”? Or maybe it’s more like “I walk, therefore I think.” At any rate, I walk a lot, to work, to the library, to concerts on campus, and I enjoy the ambulatory lifestyle. So I was very interested in this article about some [...]
So how different are men and women really? This article from The Economist examines some of the latest research into sex differences in behavior, concluding that they are real but often not easy to interpret and in many cases smaller than imagined. Of particular interest was an analysis of “all the important meta-analyses that have [...]
Men’s role in the continuation of the human race apparently affects the average length of the male lifespan. This press release describes an investigation into the differing life expectancies of men and women. On average, women live longer than men do, and the difference has been observed in humans as far back as the middle [...]
Recent research at UC Irvine indicates that male and female brains behave differently even when they’re just loafing around. This press release describes differences in amygdala activity between men and women whose brains were scanned while they were at rest. The amygdala is an almond-shaped part of the brain that is important in memory and [...]
For some reason, male and female rats respond differently to a combination of isolation and stress. The females coped much better, reacting with a stronger immune response when their immune systems were challenged after a prolonged period of isolation and a brief period of acute stress. This press release from EurekAlert describes the research and [...]
Revenge is a dish best served cold, says the proverb, but according to this article about some recent research, it’s a dish that women are more likely to pass up. Participants in a study first played a game with people they didn’t know, the purpose of which was basically to establish the reputation of the [...]
Researchers in Canada have directly measured the volume of 100 human brains to compare brain size to intelligence. (Previous studies have used imaging methods rather than direct measurement of weight or volume.) The 100 volunteers were all terminally ill, and agreed to take intelligence tests and then allow their brains to be measured after their [...]
Women and men seem to use their brains differently. A University of Alberta study examined 23 men and 10 women and found that when performing a variety of tasks (verbal, spatial, memory, and motor), men’s and women’s brains showed different patterns of activation. In some cases, men and women activated different parts of the brain [...]
One component of type A behavior is hostility. A recent study of more than 3,000 people showed that while the distribution of different levels of hostility was about the same in men and women, the medical profiles of the two sexes differed. The more hostile men were more likely to suffer from heart problems than [...]
I remember reading awhile back about how lesbians are likely to have longer ring fingers than index fingers, but I had no idea why this might be so. Here’s an article from Psychology Today that explains some of what’s going on. It turns out that between 8 and 14 weeks after conception, prenatal doses of [...]
Far more males than females are autistic. In investigating why autistic children have such a hard time relating to other people, researchers have looked at another thing that’s very different between the sexes: roughhousing or physically rough play. Boys do far more of this than girls do, and for a long time everyone thought testosterone [...]
This article from the Economist describes neurochemical differences in the way men and women perceive pain. Not only are women more sensitive to pain than men are, they respond differently to some painkillers. This is useful information for anyone who needs to prescribe (or take) analgesics. This article also contains some information about women’s [...]
Evidently men and women tend to answer that question differently. Recent research indicates that men tend to base their decisions about who to trust on joint membership in a group (going to the same school, for example). Women, on the other hand, tend to decide based on a personal connection of some sort. I’m really [...]
The drugs being used for erectile dysfunction in men have a similar physiological effect on women’s genitals, but that doesn’t reliably arouse women. You need to look at what’s going on in that all-important sex organ between the ears if you want to figure out how to create a drug that enhances female sexual satisfaction [...]
Here’s some follow-up from the Edge about the Pinker-Spelske debate on how differences in men’s and women’s brains might affect women’s participation in the sciences, which in itself was a follow-up to the uproar following some comments from Lawrence Summers of Harvard back in January. In this round, four academics react to points brought up [...]
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