Sex differences in psychology
Sex differences in psychology are differences in the mental functions and behaviors of the sexes and are due to a complex interplay of biological, developmental, and cultural factors. Differences have been found in a variety of fields such as mental health, cognitive abilities, personality, emotion, sexuality, friendship, and tendency towards aggression. Such variation may be innate, learned, or both. Modern research attempts to distinguish between these causes and to analyze any ethical concerns raised. Since behavior is a result of interactions between nature and nurture, researchers are interested in investigating how biology and environment interact to produce such differences, although this is often not possible.
A number of factors combine to influence the development of sex differences, including genetics and epigenetics; differences in brain structure and function; hormones, and socialization.
The formation of gender is controversial in many scientific fields, including psychology. Specifically, researchers and theorists take different perspectives on how much of gender is due to biological, neurochemical, and evolutionary factors, or is the result of culture and socialization. This is known as the nature versus nurture debate.
Definition
Psychological sex differences are emotional, motivational, or cognitive discrepancies between the sexes. Differences in behavior across sexes can be biological, social, or a mix of the two. The close alignment and mutual confounding between sex and gender in many individuals can make it difficult to distinguish between sex and gender differences in empirical studies. Thus, while the two terms are different, with "sex" referring to biological differences and "gender" to socially constructed ones, "sex differences" and "gender differences" are sometimes used interchangeably in psychosexual analysis.Gender is generally conceived of as a set of characteristics associated with a particular biological sex. These traits are sometimes referred to as being masculine or feminine. The definition of such gender categories is often culturally dependent. In some cultures, gender is not always conceived as binary, or strictly linked to biological sex. As a result, in some cultures there are third, fourth, or "some" genders.
History
Beliefs about sex differences have likely existed throughout history. Since at least antiquity, thinkers like Aristotle and Galen theorized maleness and femaleness as the outcome of the heat of a person's body. The history of sex research demonstrates an ongoing coexistence of multiple, conflicting meanings of sex, rather than a linear progression of better models replacing inadequate ones.In his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin proposed that, like physical traits, psychological traits evolve through the process of sexual selection:
Two of his later books, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals explore the subject of psychological differences between the sexes. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex includes 70 pages on sexual selection in human evolution, some of which concerns psychological traits.
The study of gender took off in the 1970s. During this time period, academic works were published reflecting the changing views of researchers towards gender studies. Some of these works included textbooks, as they were an important way that information was compiled and made sense of the new field. In 1978 Women and sex roles: A social psychological perspective was published, one of the first textbooks on the psychology behind women and sex roles. Another textbook to be published, Gender and Communication, was the first textbook to discuss the topic of its subject.
Other influential academic works focused on the development of gender. In 1966, The Development of Sex Differences was published by Eleanor E Maccoby. This book went into what factors influence a child's gender development, with contributors proposing the effects of hormones, social learning, and cognitive development in respective chapters. Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, by John Money was published in 1972, reporting findings of research done with intersex subjects. The book proposed that the social environment a child grows up in is more important in determining gender than the genetic factors he or she inherits. The majority of Money's theories regarding the importance of socialization in the determination of gender have come under intense criticism, especially in connection with the inaccurate reporting of success in the infant sex reassignment of David Reimer.
In 1974, The Psychology of Sex Differences was published. It said that men and women behave more similarly than had been previously supposed. They also proposed that children have much power over what gender role they grow into, whether by choosing which parent to imitate, or doing activities such as playing with action figures or dolls. These works added new knowledge to the field of gender psychology.
Psychological traits
Personality traits
Cross-cultural research has shown population-level gender differences on the tests measuring sociability and emotionality. For example, on the scales measured by the Big Five personality traits women consistently report higher neuroticism, agreeableness, warmth and openness to feelings, and men often report higher assertiveness and openness to ideas. Nevertheless, there is significant overlap in all these traits, so an individual woman may, for example, have lower neuroticism than the majority of men. The size of the differences varied between cultures. Meta-analyses have quantified these differences, finding, for instance, that the largest difference is in tender-mindedness, with women scoring higher. Other differences are smaller, such as in anxiety and assertiveness. The size of these differences can vary significantly between cultures; for example, the robust finding of greater neuroticism among women in the United States is not found in all cultures, such as Japan or among Black South Africans.Across cultures, gender differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. However, variation in the magnitude of sex differences between more or less developed world regions were due to changes between men, not women, in these respective regions. That is, men in highly developed world regions were less neurotic, extroverted, conscientious and agreeable compared to men in less developed world regions. Women, on the other hand, tended not to differ significantly in personality traits across regions.
A personality trait directly linked to emotion and empathy where gender differences exist is scored on the Machiavellianism scale. Individuals who score high on this dimension are emotionally cool; this allows them to detach from others as well as values, and act egoistically rather than driven by affect, empathy or morality. In large samples of US college students, males are on average more Machiavellian than females; in particular, males are over-represented among very high Machiavellians, while females are overrepresented among low Machiavellians. A 2014 meta-analysis by researchers Rebecca Friesdorf and Paul Conway found that men score significantly higher on narcissism than women and this finding is robust across past literature. The meta-analysis included 355 studies measuring narcissism across participants from the US, Germany, China, Netherlands, Italy, UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Australia and Belgium as well as measuring latent factors from 124 additional studies.
When interests were classified by RIASEC type Holland Codes, men were found to prefer working with things, while women preferred working with people. Men also showed stronger Realistic and Investigative interests, and women showed stronger Artistic, Social, and Conventional interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering, science, and mathematics interests.
Emotion
When measured with an affect intensity measure, women reported greater intensity of both positive and negative affect than men. Women also reported a more intense and more frequent experience of affect, joy, and love but also experienced more embarrassment, guilt, shame, sadness, anger, fear, and distress. Experiencing pride was more frequent and intense for men than for women. In imagined frightening situations, such as being home alone and witnessing a stranger walking towards your house, women reported greater fear. Women also reported more fear in situations that involved "a male's hostile and aggressive behavior". Emotional contagion refers to the phenomenon of a person's emotions becoming similar to those of surrounding people. Women have been reported to be more responsive to this. In fact, it was found in a study that men had stronger emotional experiences while women had stronger emotional expressivity, when it came to anger. It was also reported in a previous study that men had a higher physiological response to stimuli meant to induce anger. Seeing that emotional experience and expressivity are two different things, another study has found that "the emotional responses elicited by emotional videos were inconsistent between emotional experience and emotional expressivity. Men had stronger emotional experiences, whereas women had stronger emotional expressivity" where in this case emotional experience is the physiological arousal one faces due to an external stimulus and emotional expressivity is the "external expression of subjective experience."There are documented differences in socialization that could contribute to sex differences in emotion and to differences in patterns of brain activity.
Context also determines a man or woman's emotional behavior. Context-based emotion norms, such as feeling rules or display rules, "prescribe emotional experience and expressions in specific situations like a wedding or a funeral", may be independent of the person's gender. In situations like a wedding or a funeral, the activated emotion norms apply to and constrain every person in the situation. Gender differences are more pronounced when situational demands are very small or non-existent as well as in ambiguous situations. During these situations, gender norms "are the default option that prescribes emotional behavior".
In two studies by Ann Kring, women were found to be more facially expressive than men when it came to both positive and negative emotions. These researchers concluded that women and men experience the same amount of emotion, but that women are more likely to express their emotions.
Women are known to have anatomically differently shaped tear glands than men as well as having more of the hormone prolactin, which is present in tear glands, as adults. While girls and boys cry at roughly the same amount at age 12, by age 18, women generally cry four times more than men, which could be explained by higher levels of prolactin.