Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Research Says Women Manage Stress Better Than Men. Do You Agree?


Stressed men (illustrated) tend to become more selfish and less able to understand their own emotions, as well as those of other people, which can mean they behave meanly according to a team of international scientists

Stress is bad for our health, but it could also be undermining our relationships with other people, a new study has claimed.
Stressed men tend to become more selfish and less able to understand their own emotions, as well as those of other people, which can mean they behave meanly, according to a team of international scientists.
 
WHY DO WOMEN COPE BETTER WITH STRESS?
  • The study found that men tend to become more self-centred and less able to understand other people's emotions.
  • However, women become more 'prosocial' under pressure.
  • They are not exactly sure why women can cope better when stressed.

  • Dr Giorgia Silani thinks it could be because at a psychological level, women be able to internalise stress and then interact effectively with others to get support.
  • 'This means the more they need help - and are thus stressed - the more they apply social strategies,' she said.
  • The gender difference might be explained by the oxytocin system.
  • The hormone connects social behaviours and a previous study has revealed that women have higher physiological levels of oxytocin than men when they are stressed.
However, they discovered that the opposite is true for women, who become more ‘prosocial,’ perhaps because they are more able to share their problems and successfully harness external help.

While women seem to apply social straggles to cope with stressful scenarios, the study hints that men find it harder to communicate and ask for help.


‘There's a subtle boundary between the ability to identify with others and take on their perspective - and therefore be empathic - and the inability to distinguish between self and other, thus acting egocentrically,’ said of Giorgia Silani from the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste in Italy.
‘To be truly empathic and behave prosocially it's important to maintain the ability to distinguish between self and other and stress appears to play an important role in this,’ she said.
Stress is a psycho-biological mechanism that enables a person to recruit extra resources when they are faced with a demanding situation.
This lets us cope with a stressful scenario by either trying to reduce the internal ‘extra’ resources or by seeking external support, she said.
The researchers, who were also from the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Unit of the University of Vienna and the University of Freiburg, began their study with a starting hypothesis that stressed individuals tend to be more egocentric.

The researchers are not sure why women cope better with stress but said that at a psychosocial level, females may have internalised the stressful experience so that they receive more external support by sharing their problems and interacting better with others (pictured)
The researchers are not sure why women cope better with stress but said that at a psychosocial level, females may have internalised the stressful experience so that they receive more external support by sharing their problems and interacting better with others (pictured)
 
They said that taking a selfish perspective reduces the emotional and cognitive load and that they expected people to be less empathetic in the study, which was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
However, they were surprised to find that only men become more self-centred under stress.
They created ‘conditions of moderate stress’ in a laboratory by forcing participants to take mental arithmetic tests and to make a speech.
The participants - half of whom were female and the other half male - then had to imitate certain movements to demonstrate motor control, recognise their own or other people’s emotions or make a judgement taking on another person's perspective to display cognitive condition.
‘What we observed was that stress worsens the performance of men in all three types of tasks. The opposite is true for women’ Dr Silani said.
 
The researchers were surprised to find that only men become more self-centred under stress. They created 'conditions of moderate stress' in a laboratory by forcing participants to take mental arithmetic tests (illustrated) and make a speech to come to their conclusion
The researchers were surprised to find that only men become more self-centred under stress. They created 'conditions of moderate stress' in a laboratory by forcing participants to take mental arithmetic tests (illustrated) and make a speech to come to their conclusion

The researchers are not sure why this happens but said they might try and find possible explanations in subsequent studies.
‘At a psychosocial level, women may have internalised the experience that they receive more external support when they are able to interact better with others,’ Dr Silani said.
‘This means that the more they need help - and are thus stressed - the more they apply social strategies’
Dr Silani said that at a physiological level, the gender difference might be accounted for by the oxytocin system.
‘Oxytocin is a hormone connected with social behaviours and a previous study found that in conditions of stress women had higher physiological levels of oxytocin than men,’ she added
 
DailyMail
 

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