Motivation and emotion/Book/2014/Gender and emotion

Gender And Emotion

Gender studies have always been prevalent in the area of emotion. Many studies have shown gender differences in the way that people experience and show emotion. However it must be noted that often times contextual factors can play a definitive role in gender differences in emotion. Sayings such as “boys don’t cry” and “sugar and spice and everything nice – that’s what girls are made of” show cultural beliefs and expectations that girls show lots of emotions (mainly sadness or happiness) and boys are calm and strong, whilst showing anger when necessary (Chaplin & Aldao, 2013).

There have been many studies conducted on the beliefs and expectations of emotional expressiveness that reflect these sentiments. When asking adults and children about their expectations of emotional expression it is found that they believe woman show and feel more emotion than their male counterparts (Chaplin & Aldao, 2013).

It is important to realise the differences in gender differences in experiencing emotion, as emotion is important in the healthy development of a person. Many pieces of evidence point to the fact that if a person is limited in their emotional experiences, and are encouraged to express particular emotions, there is greater likelihood of lesser socio-motional functioning later in life (Chaplin & Cole, 2005).

Healthy social development depends on a person’s ability to learn to express emotion. Over the first few years of life, children develop flexible patterns of facial vocal and behavioural expressions of emotions that allow them to communicate their feelings according to which situation (Malatesta & Wilson, 1988). They learn which emotions to express and when to express them, facilitating the development of social relationships. Thus children are learning the socially appropriate ways of expressing emotion, and due to the nature of responding to other people’s requests and responses, learn which behaviours are deemed socially acceptable.

Theories of emotional response

Within research of emotion, three significant theories can be clearly categorised: physiological, neurological, and cognitive. Physiological theories imply that activity within the body can be accountable for emotions. Neurological theories suggest that activity within the brain leads to emotional responses. Lastly, cognitive theories reason that thoughts and other mental activity have a vital role in the stimulation of emotions. The study of emotion has been conducted for a long time, and many theories of emotion have arisen, apart from the stated above. For Example:

James-Lange theory of emotion The James-Lange theory of emotion was proposed by psychologist William James and physiologist Carl Lange. This theory suggests that emotions occur as a result of physiological responses to outside stimuli or events.

Cannon-Bard theory of emotion The Cannon-Bard theory, which was conceptualized by Walter Cannon and Phillip Bard, suggests that emotions and their corresponding physiological responses are experienced simultaneously.

Schachter-Singer theory of emotion Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed a theory also known as the two-factor theory of emotion, which implies emotion have two factors: physical arousal and cognitive label. This suggests that the physiological activity occurs first, and then it must cognitively be distinguished as the cause of the arousal and labelled as an emotion.

Theories of Gender Differences: Emotion

The development of gender differences in regards to experiencing emotion comes down to the nature versus nurture debate. As in most cases however most theorists draw from both a biological construct and a social developmental construct.

Biological theorists have shown that males and females show innate biological differences that cause them to experience emotions differently to one another. Many of these differences appear at birth or, through growth and reaching maturity, unfold themselves later in life. The early gender differences reflect gender differences in gene expression and the influences of sex hormones in utero, which contribute to brain and body differences in males and females. Lower inhibitory control and language abilities may lead boys to having a more difficult time regulating negative emotions to meet contextual demands and thus tend to show more aggressive emotion (Zahn-Waxler, Shirtcliff, Marceau, 2008).

In socio-developmental theories it is proposed that children learn gender role behaviours over time. This can be through a number of mediums, such as cognitive learning, socialization, and experience. Gender schema theory suggests that children actively learn behaviours that are gender based. According to this theory, boys and girls develop cognitive schemas for gender based on the observation of their environments. This observation leads to a gathering of information on the behaviours and traits associated with being a boy or girl. With time children will then start to select activities and environments that fit with their schema. Social learning suggests that children are encouraged through modelling or explicit teaching to adopt behaviours consistent with their gender role. In regards to emotion, these socio-developmental theories suggest that differences in emotion between genders should become stronger with age as children learn to behave in their gender schema and have more socialization experience (Chaplin & Aldao, 2013).

Brody (1999) proposed that gender differences in emotions develop based on a combination of innate predispositions (biological model) and socialization by parents, teachers, and peers into the cultural roles previously described. Brody suggested that, as infants and children, boys have higher activity levels, arousal, and displays of negative emotion. They also have less language ability and inhibitory control than girls, all of which are biologically based. Because of these early differences between the sexes it was proposed that parents and other socialization agents may respond to boys in ways that dampen their emotional expressiveness. This in turn encourages boys to limit emotions as a way to down-regulate their high emotional arousal and activity levels. This theory has been backed up with experimental support, with Buck (1977) finding that boy’s emotional expressiveness decreasing with age from 4-6 years old, whereas girls did not.

In contrast, it is theorized that parents encourage emotions in their young girls, talking to them about emotions because of girls’ larger vocabularies and more communicative skills (indeed, research shows that parents do use more emotion words when talking with daughters than sons). This would lead girls to be more emotionally expressive than boys in general. Further, given the gender roles for girls to avoid antagonism and to promote comfort in others, parents and other socialization agents may particularly encourage happiness and internalizing emotion expressions in girls, through modelling of gender-specific patterns of emotional expression and/or through reacting to children’s emotion expressions in ways that promote adherence to gender roles ( Chaplin 2000). This transmission of gender roles may further encourage girls to show greater positive and internalizing emotions than boys and may also encourage boys to show greater externalizing emotions than girls.

Self-Conscious Emotions

Externalizing behaviours are clearly shown to be affected by outside agencies, whom shape the behaviours of growing children, moulding them to cultural norms. It is possible then that self-conscious emotion are a more personal, and less effected by others and the culture in which we live. Self-conscious emotions are moral emotions that function to facilitate our social interactions and relationships by motivating us to adhere to social norms and personal standards (Goffman, 1967). These emotions can be distinguished from “basic” emotions, as they require self-awareness and self-representations (M. Lewis, 2008), are more cognitively complex, promote the attainment of sophisticated social goals, and have not clearly demonstrated discrete, universally recognized facial expressions.

Broadly, there are four self-conscious emotion —shame, guilt, pride, and embarrassment. Developmental psychologists maintain that the ability to experience embarrassment begins to emerge around 2 years of age, when the child becomes capable of self-consciousness or self-recognition. Around 3 years of age, the child begins to acquire and retain a new set of cognitions, including cultural standards, rules, and goals; the ability to evaluate one's behaviour according to those standards and to make attributions about the self develops in. Following these metacognitive developments, the child's ability to experience pride, shame, and guilt emerges.

Gender Differences in self-conscious emotion

Women have long been stereotyped as generally more emotional than men. Yet, there is some variation in the direction of this gender difference according to the specific emotion. Women are stereotyped as experiencing more awe, distress, fear, happiness, love, sadness, shyness, surprise, and sympathy than men, whereas men are stereotyped as experiencing more anger than women . With regard to the specific self-conscious emotion, women are stereotyped as experiencing more guilt, shame, and embarrassment, whereas men are stereotyped as experiencing more pride (Plant et al., 2000). Empirical studies of gender differences in emotion indicate that although women generally express more emotion and emotional intensity than men, there is mixed evidence of gender differences in emotional experience (Grossman & Wood, 1993). Qualitative literature reviews of self-conscious emotion state and trait experience describe a pattern of gender similarities in authentic pride, whereas women score higher on shame, guilt, and embarrassment, and men score higher on pride.

Self-Esteem and Well-Being

As the self-conscious emotion are self-evaluative phenomena, they are also inextricably tied to self-esteem and well-being (M. Lewis, 1993). Empirical research demonstrates that shame and hubristic pride are negatively linked to self-esteem and positively linked to depression, where as authentic pride shows the reverse pattern. Men and boys tend to report greater self-esteem than women and girls, though the gender difference is small. Yet, the gender gap in self-esteem varies substantially across domain, such that gender differences in self-esteem related to physical appearance, athletics, personal self, and self-satisfaction are small and favour men, whereas gender differences in self-esteem in behavioural conduct and moral–ethical domains are small and favor women.

Shame has been linked to a variety of psychopathologies that display gender differences in diagnosis, such as depression, anxiety, disordered eating, and suicidality. The well-documented gender difference in depression that emerges in adolescence hints at gender differences in shame (favouring girls) beginning in adolescence. Moreover, shame about the body mediates the link between self-objectification and depression among adolescent girls. In sum, gender differences in a number of psychopathologies involving shame provide a context for gender differences in shame experience and suggest similar gender differences in that particular self-conscious emotion.

Temperament and Personality

Emotional experience is closely linked to temperament and personality. With regard to childhood temperament, Else-Quest et al. (2006) found that dimensions comprising negative affectivity showed negligible or very small gender differences. In contrast, meta-analyses of gender differences in adult personality have shown a pattern of gender differences in neuroticism and its facets, such as depression, angry hostility, and anxiety. The temperament and personality literature indicate a pattern of gender similarities in childhood negative affectivity and gender differences (favoring women) in adult neuroticism. Correspondingly, it is possible that negative self-conscious emotions will show a pattern of gender similarities in childhood with gender differences (favoring women) in adulthood.

Women are ubiquitously stereotyped as more emotional than men. The stereotype that women experience more guilt, shame, and, to some extent, embarrassment was substantiated by this meta-analysis, but gender stereotypes about pride appear groundless (Motluk, 2002).

Gender differences

The opposition of rational thought and emotion is believed to be paralleled by the similar opposition between male and female. A traditional view is that "men are seen as rational and women as emotional, lacking rationality." However, in spite of these ideas, and in spite of gender differences in the prevalence of mood disorders, the empirical evidence on gender differences in emotional responding is mixed. It is possible that the best explanation for this difference in expression of emotions could be due to societal influences and conformity to gender roles. Another broad explanation for the contrast in male and female gender expression is that women have reported to experience greater levels of emotional intensity than men, in both positive and negative aspects, which could naturally lead to greater emotional response (Motluk, 2002). Hormones Sex hormones, such as testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, and vasopressin have differential psychological effects on men and women. Emotion 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". In anger-eliciting situations, women communicated more intense feelings of anger than men. Women also reported more intense feelings of anger in relation to terrifying situations, especially situations involving a male protagonist. When lacking substantial emotion information they can base judgments on, people tend to rely more on gender stereotypes. Results from a study conducted by Robinson and colleagues implied that gender stereotypes are more influential when judging others' emotions in a hypothetical situation. There are documented differences in socialization that could contribute to sex differences in emotion and to differences in patterns of brain activity. An American Psychological Association article states that, "boys are generally expected to suppress emotions and to express anger through violence, rather than constructively". A child development researcher at Harvard University argues that boys are taught to shut down their feelings, such as empathy, sympathy and other key components of what is deemed to be pro-social behavior. According to this view, differences in emotionality between the sexes are theoretically only socially-constructed, rather than biological. 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," 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." Scientists in the field distinguish between emotionality and the expression of emotion: Associate Professor of Psychology Ann Kring said, "It is incorrect to make a blanket statement that women are more emotional than men, it is correct to say that women show their emotions more than men." In two studies by Kring, women were found to be morefacially expressive than men when it came to both positive and negative emotions. These researchers concluded that men and women 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. In a study where researchers wanted to concentrate on nonverbal expressions by just looking at the eyebrows, lips, and the eyes, participants read certain cue cards that were either negative or positive and recorded the responses. In the results of this experiment it is shown that feminine emotions happen more frequently and have a higher intensity in women than men. In relation to the masculine emotions, such as anger, the results are flipped and the women’s frequency and intensity is lower than the men’s. Studies that measure facial expression by the use of electromyography recordings show that women are more adequately able to manipulate their facial expressions than men. Men, however can inhibit their expressions better than females when cued to do so. In the observer ratings women’s facial expressions are easier to read as opposed to men’s except for the expression of anger. Women show a significantly greater activity in the left amygdala when encoding and remembering emotionally arousing pictures (such as mutilated bodies.) Men and women tend to use different neural pathways to encode stimuli into memory. While highly emotional pictures were remembered best by all participants in one study, as compared to emotionally neutral images, women remembered the pictures better than men. This study also found greater activation of the right amygdala in men and the left amygdala in women. On average, women use more of the left cerebral hemisphere when shown emotionally arousing images, while men use more of their right hemisphere. Women also show more consistency between individuals for the areas of the brain activated by emotionally disturbing images. One study of 12 men and 12 women found that more areas in the brains of women were highly activated by emotional imagery, though the differences may have been due to the upbringing of the test participants. When women are asked to think about past events that made them angry, they show activity in the septum in the limbic system; this activity is absent in males. In contrast, men's brains show more activity in the limbic system when asked to identify happy or sad male and female faces. Men and women also differ in their ability to recognize sad female faces: in one study, men recognized 70%, while women recognized 90%. Responses to pain also reveal sex differences. In women, the limbic system, which is involved in the processing of emotions, shows greater activity in response to pain. In men, cognitive areas of the brain, which are involved in analytical processing, show higher activity in response to pain.This indicates a connection between pain-responsive brain regions and emotional regions in women. A 2003 worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center found that overall women stated that they were somewhat happier than men with their lives. Compared to the previous report five years earlier women more often reported progress with their lives while men were more optimistic about the future. Women were more concerned about home and family issues than men who were more concerned about issues outside the home. Men were happier than women regarding the family life and more optimistic regarding the children's future.

References

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Zahn-Waxler, C., Shirtcliff, E. A., Marceau, K. (2008). Disorders of childhood and adolescence: Gender and psychopathology. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 4. 11.1-11.29. doi:10.1146/annuary.clinpsy