MONDAY, July 22, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Next time you're at odds with your wife, consider backing down if the debate's about feelings. If emotions are at stake, there's a good chance she's right.
Women remember emotion-laden events more deeply and vividly than do men, a new study has found, and they use different parts of their brains when doing so.
Earlier research had found a strong gender component to emotional memory, and linked it to the amygdala, an almond-shaped emotion locus in both hemispheres of the brain. In women, the left side of the amygdala appears to drive emotional recall, while for men the nature of the memory is not as closely linked to that center.
The new work, appearing in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that other brain areas are also implicated in emotional memory, too -- at least for women.
Turhan Canli, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led the research while a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in California.
Canli's group showed 96 images to 12 men and 12 women that ranged from the emotionally neutral (a desk or fire plug) to the disturbing (a mutilated body or an accident scene). As they viewed the pictures, the volunteers had their brain activity scanned by a form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Women were more likely than men to consider a picture highly negative, and they were more likely than men to remember those images rated unsettling by both sexes.
They also appeared to have nine brain regions actively involved in the imprinting and commitment to memory of emotionally rich stimuli, compared with just two for men.
"For women, who in our study had better emotional memory, there were a number of different locations where the emotional experience and coding into memory coincided. It's processed in the same [brain] tissue," Canli said.
Three weeks later, Canli's group gave the volunteers a pop quiz on what they'd seen, selecting only those images rated most emotionally charged by both men and women. Women were more likely to say they remembered the images vividly, the researchers found. They were also more accurate in picking the ones they had seen.
"They were better in every way in this test," says John Gabrieli, a Stanford University psychologist and a co-author of the study.
Of course, the definition of what's "emotionally" weighty is largely, if not entirely, subjective. "There are no wrong answers," Canli says. "If someone rates [a picture] as highly emotional, that's how it is."
Canli has studied how personality shapes emotional memory, and has found similarly large gaps between people as between the genders. He says there's as much variability between how any two individuals will appraise the emotional content of a scene as there is between groups of men and women.
Gabrieli says the study doesn't speak to why men and women differ in their ability to recall the tears of things: "There's nothing that tells us whether it's genes or experience."
Although genetics may play a role, it's also possible the disparate messages society sends men and women program each gender's emotional reading. Intriguingly, he notes, young children are quite poor at assessing the emotional content of faces, indicating a strong learned component to the skill.
What To Do
To find out more about the mind, visit the National Institute of Mental Health or this site from PBS.
