A study published in Biological Psychology confirms women are more emotionally aware than men as the latter manifest greater emotional response concordance.
“Past studies on emotional responding rarely account for sex differences. However, sex differences could explain diverging findings between studies, particularly with regard to emotional concordance – the synchronization of experiential (self-report), physiological, and behavioral response systems,” said study author Julina A. Rattel, a member of the Clinical Stress and Emotion Lab at the University of Salzburg.
“Although women are thought to be more emotionally aware and expressive than men and may therefore display stronger response concordance, research on this topic is scant.”
The study, “Sex Differences in Emotional Concordance," examined 44 participants who watched 15 short film clips. The team explored their respiratory, autonomic, and facial muscular-behavioral responses. The respondents also expressed their subjective emotional experience following the viewing of each clip.
According to the team's data, women exhibit stronger concordances than men. This suggests that women’s subjective self-reported emotions reflect their objectively-measured responses.
Results “provide strong support that emotions are composed of multiple response systems (self-report, physiology, and behavior) that cohere across multiple situations,” Rattel told PsyPost.
“Present results revealed higher response concordance in women than men across a range of physiological and behavioral measures. This fits with research showing that women are better than men at recognizing emotions, express themselves more easily and pay more attention to and be more aware of their emotions," she added.
Rattel and her colleagues discovered that the sex difference in emotional concordance was not the outcome of differences in emotional reactivity.
However, the study comes with some limitations.
“Although the present study found strong associations both between experiential and physiological and between experiential and behavioral measures, we cannot draw any conclusions with regard to the directionality of this relationship. In the current study, physiological reactions to films might have triggered or enhanced subjective feelings of arousal and valence or vice versa,” Rattel said.
“Our current thinking favors the view that evolution brought about highly interacting central and peripheral nervous system circuits and pathways that result in dynamically interacting, bi-directional, and recursive experiential, physiological, and behavioral responses, making it hard to dissect temporal relationships; though, this view needs further testing.”
The other authors of the study are Iris B. Mauss, Michael Liedlgruber, and Frank. H. Wilhelm.
Physical health
In terms of physical health, women appear to be healthier than men.
A study published in The Lancet suggested that women are less likely to have cardiovascular disease and die of it compared to men.
The researchers from the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences examined more than 160,000 people in 21 countries.
Results of the “Variations between women and men in risk factors, treatments, cardiovascular disease incidence, and death in 27 high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries (PURE): a prospective cohort study” suggested that women are less likely to have cardiovascular disease than men.
The study showed that several factors did not matter to the results, such as if women had, or did not have, a heart attack or stroke before, where they lived around the world, and their economic status.
