We have known since we were little that boys and girls are different in certain ways, but now finding out that boys and girls are even more different than we previously thought is interesting. All the way down to how we deal with situations in life brings into light why we might not understand each other's reactions in stressful situations. Science has, until recently, thought that at least on the physiology side of things, men and women were just "human" and our bodies were thought to react the same as the other gender. Things have turned out to very different than previously believed.
Going through stressful situations in my life I knew that I liked to talk to my mother and my friends and my significant other and just thought that that was normal and the right thing to do, because it makes me feel better and calmer. Come to find out that, yes this is normal, for women to affiliate with others in order to deal with stressful situations, but it is not common for men to do the same. They truly do, do the fight or flight reactions in similar situations, it is in their nature. With correct information, comes understanding and peace. If we know that even the way in how men and women react to stressful situations is different in how our physiology changes than we all can try to change our way of reacting to each other through those situations and begin to open communication pathways that will benefit both partners in a relationship.
Recently in 4. Gender Disparities Category
We have known since we were little that boys and girls are different in certain ways, but science is now finding out that boys and girls are more different than we previously thought and this is a very interesting finding. All the way down to the cellular level our bodies react differnently than the other gender. Situations in life that are stressful are reacted to differently than the other gender with what hormones are released and how they affect us. Science has thought, until recently, that boys and girls were the same and had "human" reactions to stressful situations, but now they are realizing that physiology changes are very different for women than they are for men.
Going through stressful situations in my life I knew that I liked and craved to talke to my mother, my friends and my significant other about what was going on and just thought that was normal and the right thing to do, because it made me feel better and calmer. Come to find out, yes this is normal, for women to affiliate with others in order to deal with stressed emotions in order to help alliviate stress, but this is not common for men to react the same way. They truly do, do the fight or flight reactions in similar situations, it is their nature and how their physiology tries to combat the stressful situations.
With correct information, comes understanding, acceptance and peace. If we know that even the way in how men and women react to stressful situations, physiology speaking, is different in how our bodies react than we can begin to understand why both genders have different tendencies in how they deal with the stress in situations. So if we can understand these differences, we can change how we as individuals react to each other when there is stress in the air and begin to open communication pathways that will benefit both partners in a relationship and in turn there will be less miscommunications and less stress, hopefully.
Relationships can be stressful at times and those who are unfortunate to have their closest relationships also be their primary source of stress are likely to be experiencing corrosive effects on their health. Shelley Taylor and her colleagues have summarized a large and diverse set of human and animal studies that demonstrate how the sex hormones estrogen and testosterone are deeply linked to the stress response.
Historically, most of our understanding for how both humans and animals reacted to stress was from the classic "fight or flight" model. Researchers have only recently noticed gender differences in the stress response perhaps because research in this area has traditionally been limited to male participants.
In many studies even the rats were all male!
What we now know is that women are more likely to seek out social support and engage in care giving when stressed whereas men are more likely to engage the fight or flight response. You can start to see that what women and men start out with biologically might be a source of misunderstanding when couples are under stress.
Once an argument starts, the stress response engages. She wants to affiliate, draw closer, and talk about the problem. His body is preparing for increased aggression and since modern society discourages spousal abuse he may tend to be more inclined to seek avoidance by disengaging.
Sound familiar?
Again, oxytocin is involved here but as the Taylor article points out the pathways are complex and somewhat contradictory. Oxytocin appears to work together with endogenous opioids, our own feel good neurochemicals, to make social bonding pleasurable. Sex hormones play a critical role since androgens inhibit the stress-induced release of oxytocin, while estrogen enhances the stress buffering effects of oxytocin.
Interpersonal situations matter such that when her affiliative efforts are unsuccessful, the biological stress response increases by way of the sympathetic nervous system and HPA axis activation. When support seeking is reciprocated the opiod system engages to reduce sympathetic nervous system and the HPA axis limiting the amount of cortisol and other stress hormones in the bloodstream.
Oxytocin can therefore be at high levels when we are bonding with loved ones and also when we are feeling rejected, perhaps as a signaling system to increase efforts to seek out secure relationships. Often times when we fight with our partner there is no one else to turn to for satisfying the body's need for compassion and caring. Perhaps this is the reason we turn to alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and comfort food when we are stressed, especially when that stress involves our closest relationships.
Shelley E. Taylor in her study "Tend and Befriend" mentioned about gender difference in terms of stress and a basic "fight or flight" reaction under stress. The article mainly talks about a hormone called oxytocin and suggested that it causes a gender differences in behavior under stress. Oxytocin can help modulating one's stress responses, it could also attenuates or exacerbate psychological and biological stress response depended on different contacts. One point I remember the most about this article is that oxytocin is more influential to female than to male in terms of social behavior under stress. The article suggested that the role of male and female is largely segregated by sex; when we are under stress, female are more responsible for care giving.
In addition, we talked about this point in class about why would female's responsibility make all the differences is because when you are under stress, you are more likely to care giving which may make you feel more stressful especially when babies are crying and you have to talk care of all different things at the same time which make your body produce even more stress hormone. To me I believe that fighting as a stress release could make male having more oxytocin especial if they win.
This article make me understand more about why would a male be more likely to fight and a female is more likely to flight, I believe that the oxytocin itself make a big difference here, if male and female have a different responsibility especially when they are under stress, male tend to protect his family or property by fighting whatever causes the threat under a "powerful enough" situation and when female are under stress, they are more likely to flight. However,one question come into my mind after reading the study: would a trans-gender male /female reaction under stress changes or stick with their original gender's reaction after having their hormone treatment?
I found this article kind of dense and I did not recognize the relation to gender disparities until the end of the article but the article brought up a few interesting points. The way women deal with their stress is completely different than how man would want to deal with it. I see this within my parents and my own relationships. My boyfriend finds it very difficult to help me or be there for me when I am upset or stressed. I probably end up crying and letting my emotion take control and that those moments all I really want is for him to listen. He continues to try to give me advice or saying "I am not sure what you want me to do."
Between my parents, the minute my mom gets stressed she is on the phone talking to someone, whether it's her sister, me or a friend. My dad on the other hand, you try to avoid when you know he is stressed because he gets extremely edgy and snappy. He isolates himself into his job or just being my himself.
The article introduced a lot of idea and information that you can deal with and experience every day but may not even realize that their is studies and biology to back up why and how the opposite sex deals with stress and stress response.
The article by Shelley Taylor suggests a biological signaling difference in gender by discussing the hormone fluctuations in males and females. There have been many implications in gender differences with the release of oxytocin, but it has been discovered that oxytocin both attenuates and diminishes stress. Social relationships are better understood after looking at the role of oxytocin in modulating stress. "Befriending" or tending to offspring is generally a motherly gesture, further suggesting that the higher levels of oxytocin in females correlates with the affiliative behavior in response to a stressful behavior.
A major gender difference between males and females is the biological fact that males carry a recessive (Y) chromosome. Perhaps the high levels of testosterone provoke men to avoid problems through withdrawal and reliance on physical aggression. Females in a stressful situation will resort to communication or social contacts. It is natural for females to want to draw attention and become more affiliative, and this can be seen through the elevated levels of oxytocin and estrogen. Although both men and women resort to different types of aggression expression, the human brain registers social pain and phsycial pain in a similar manner. As discussed in the article, testosterone is linked to hostility and increased cardiovascular activity. In animals, the administration of oxytocin has shown to decrease sympathetic reactivity, blood pressure, pain sensitivity, and corticosteroid levels.
The effects of oxytocin have shown to benefit women heavily, after a series of studies done on human females and female animals. Biologically, men are more suceptible to muscle dystrophy, autism, and other genetic mutations. There is not as much research regarding the oxytocin benefits for male social relationships. Perhaps further studies should explore the role of oxytocin in a male's response to stress.
-Sarika Joshi
I have fast become interested in discovering more about oxytocin and I always enjoy learning or hypothesizing about evolutionary functions in psychology. Since oxytocin is implicated in affiliative behavior it makes sense that, from an evolutionary standpoint, women tend to have higher levels of oxytocin because women were (and in most cases still are) responsible for the caretaking of offspring and for social networking in the tribe. Men's oxytocin levels differ then because their job was primarily hunting which does not require as much social bonding and so in response to stress rather than social bonding men would have taken to the fight-or-flight behavior. We can see how these behaviors manifest today. Women still want to chat about things and men, stereotypically, tend to shy away from uncomfortable topics. It is not surprising then that oxytocin levels are higher in women than in men.
So, this might be somewhat of a stereotype but...some gay men behave in a similarly social manner as women. For example, maybe they gossip as much as women might. I wonder if those men have elevated oxytocin levels. I looked (albeit briefly) to see if there have been any studies on this topic or something like it but I have not found anything. Has anybody else come across a related study? Please share if so.
I feel like I should point out that this does not only apply to just some gay men. My dad is not gay and is pretty attune to what is happening with everybody and expresses an interest in people's lives. Maybe it is because he studied communication. I don't know. Anyway, I guess I wonder if people in general with an exceptionally friendly personality might have higher levels of oxytocin than others.
The article we read for class was about the differences between men and women's style of coping with stress. Women tend to "tend and befriend" while men do not necessarily rely on social networks of friends to get them through tough times. Men may usually go for the ol' fight or flight response. The article included a lot of information about the chemical/hormonal aspect of coping with stress, more so for women than men.
I do not know if we discussed this in class, but the flight of flight repsonse may not be elicited in women as much, from an evolutionary perspective, because fighting, per se, is not a good option if the female is pregnant. Fleeing a situation may not go over well is a female is late in her pregnancy or if she has children to take care of.
It is easy to oversimplify the gender differences of these findings but differences in coping do exist. Overall, seeking social support is beneficial to both men and women. It has been shown that any social support in a tough time is beneficial. Women seem to rush to social networks for more than just social support but men may follow the path of the buffering hypothesis. This means that men may only seek support only in a time of stress, but this may not necessarily be true for all men.
This article was extremely dense but I thought it was interesting the different types of oxytocin are associated with almost opposite feelings. The plasma oxytocin is associated with relationship stress while oxytocin is associated with positive relationships. It continues to amaze me that people's body chemistry can change due to the relationships we have and the connections that we make.
Before I studied psychology I studied genetics and I have always subscribed to the idea that there is always an underlying genetic cause for much of our behavior. When I read articles like this it makes me realize and understand the importance of the environment we surround ourselves with. I gain a new understanding of the serious effects that emotions can play in ones physical self.
I think it is important to discover the balance of friends and alone time. Some people recharge their batteries by taking time to themselves and some people need others around them to recharge. As a clear extrovert I need many people around me to feel normal. I can tell when I start to get drained by homework because I have been by myself for too long. Its part of the reason I love bartending so much; because it is a release for me and a way to recharge. I could be having the worse day, be over tired, and just hating life but the second I walk into my bar and see familiar faces and interact with many people I feel energized.
The idea that social relationships affect our chemistry is pretty amazing. Clearly these things have come from evolving to need each other and depend on one another. Social relationships are critical in our lives; not only for good times but also on a biological basis.
Taylor's article delves into the subject of "tend and befriend", a response that is very much stress induced like the classic fight-or-flight response. At the heart of the topic is oxytocin, a hormone which can cause behavioral and emotional changes in people, particularly women.
Oxytocin can be described like a double-edged sword. On one hand, it reduces stress and promotes positive thinking and affect. On the other, it can make stress more pronounced, heightens pre-existing negative affect and create a bias towards ingroups. In this way, shouldn't oxytocin be thought of more as having a magnifying quality rather than saying that it "causes" changes? The reason is because the feelings, positive or negative, are already there. Oxytocin gives it the push to go off the roof.
It is stated that oxytocin is what bonds mother to child and that a large amount of it gets released during childbirth. Recently, my mother's cat just gave birth to kittens. Before, she was always the kind of cat that was aloof and disliked contact. She was also quite "childish"--she was very playful and verbal. However, once she gave birth, it seemed almost like a mechanical switch was made.
Concerning her behavior towards us, she became less playful but it seems she now enjoys being touched more than in the past. Overall, she became more serious and worries over her babies a lot. Her switch into caregiver and motherhood seemed like such a sudden and dramatic change, most likely because she had no "training". Nobody had to tell her how to do it. Once she had kittens, she immediately knew what to do. Some might just call this the mothering instinct but how much of it is mandated by oxytocin?
