3 Results

Posts Tagged brain

June 1, 2011

Brain differences by sex

Sex On The Brain

ScienceDaily (May 8, 2007) — New evidence on sex differences in people’s brains and behaviors emerges with the publication of results from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Sex ID Internet Survey.  Survey questions and tests focused on participants’ sex-linked cognitive abilities, personality traits, interests, sexual attitudes and behavior, as well as physical traits.

Sex On The Brain

BBC Science, in collaboration with researchers in the United Kingdom and North America, designed their research project on psychological sex differences in conjunction with their TV documentary, Secrets of the Sexes. 

The project culminated in the creation of the BBC Internet Survey, which was posted on the BBC Science and Nature website. In just three months (February-May 2005), over 250,000 people from all over the world responded to the full survey.  Some  initial results were presented in July 2005 in the program, Secrets of the Sexes.

Key topics and findings from the April issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior (Vol 36, No 2)

  • Mental abilities decline with age more in men than in women.  All mental abilities decline with age, but the decline is steeper in men than in women.  Furthermore, this effect is independent of sexual orientation.
  • Sex differences and cultural variations in mate preferences.  Across all participants, the traits ranked most important in a relationship partner are intelligence, humor, honesty, kindness, overall good looks, face attractiveness, values, communication skills and dependability.  However, on average, men rank good looks and facial attractiveness more important than women do, whereas women rank honesty, humor, kindness, and dependability more important than men do.
  • Associations among birth order, handedness and sexual orientation.  The strongest handedness (left- or right-handedness) finding for both sexes is a marked tendency for participants who describe themselves as bisexual also to describe themselves as ambidextrous.
  • Sex differences and sexual orientation differences in mental abilities.  Across nations, men score higher than women on tests of mental rotation and the ability to judge line angles, whereas women score higher than men on tests of object location memory and word fluency.  On average, gay men’s visual-spatial abilities differ from those of heterosexual men—shifted in the direction of women’s abilities.  Similarly, lesbian women’s visual-spatial abilities differ from those of heterosexual women—shifted in the direction of men’s abilities.
  • The link between sex drive and attractions to men and women.  For women, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to both women and men.  For men, however, high sex drive is associated with increased attraction to one sex or the other, but not both, depending on their sexual orientation.
 

March 13, 2010

Why rejection hurts: a common neural alarm system … [Trends Cogn Sci. 2004] – PubMed result

Numerous languages characterize ‘social pain’, the feelings resulting from social estrangement, with words typically reserved for describing physical pain (‘broken heart’, ‘broken bones’) and perhaps for good reason. It has been suggested that, in mammalian species, the social-attachment system borrowed the computations of the pain system to prevent the potentially harmful consequences of social separation. Mounting evidence from the animal lesion and human neuroimaging literatures suggests that physical and social pain overlap in their underlying neural circuitry and computational processes. We review evidence suggesting that the anterior cingulate cortex plays a key role in the physical-social pain overlap. We also suggest that the physical-social pain circuitry might share components of a broader neural alarm system.

Why rejection hurts: a common neural alarm system … [Trends Cogn Sci. 2004] – PubMed result

Basically, goes to show how much pain men go through in our society. Basically rejection hurts in the exact same was as physical pain, and in our societies its expected for men to do the lions share of taking rejections. This is something our society likes to ignore when treating men like the disposable gender.

 

January 22, 2010

Male and female brains are different

Men and Women Really Do Think Differently | LiveScience

Psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine led the research along with colleagues from the University of New Mexico. Their findings show that in general, men have nearly 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence compared with women, whereas women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence compared to men.

Men and Women Really Do Think Differently | LiveScience

This research also gives insight to why different types of head injuries are more disastrous to one sex or the other. For example, in women 84 percent of gray matter regions and 86 percent of white matter regions involved in intellectual performance were located in the frontal lobes, whereas the percentages of these regions in a man’s frontal lobes are 45 percent and zero, respectively. This matches up well with clinical data that shows frontal lobe damage in women to be much more destructive than the same type of damage in men.