14.1.11

Stress & Gender

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The Relationship Between Stress & Gender

Here are biological, cognitive and social explanations for the relationship between stress and gender.

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Biological explanations for stress

  • Taylor et al (2000) argues that women have evolved a tend and befriend response to stress rather than fight or flight because of the need to protect offspring from predators, which makes fighting or fleeing difficult.
  • Oxytocin is a mainly female hormone (although males do have it too). Oestrogen increases the levels of oxytocin and this produces a reduced stress response.
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Social explanations for stress

  • Traditionally, it is thought that women are more likely to seek social support and talk to friends and families about stressors.
  • Brown & Harris (1978) investigated the impact of social support in mitigating the negative effects of stress. The method was self-report (interviews) with 400 women living in Camberwell, London.
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Brown & Harris (1978) findings

  • Between 20-40% revealed a serious mental health issue (depression) in the preceding 12 months that had been triggered by a stressful event such as a bereavement or family breakdown.
  • However, there were many women who had very similar stressful events in their lives who had not then experienced mental illness.
  • The common factor in those that had not suffered with mental illness was close, supportive friendships.
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Brown & Harris (1978) conclusion

  • Social support in the form of close, supportive friendships can mitigate against the negative effects of stress on mental illness.
  • Strengths
    • Ecological validity.
    • Practical applications.
  • Limitations
    • Self-report – demand characteristics and social desirability.
    • Need to consider other factors too.
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Cognitive explanations for stress

  • Men tend to use problem-focused methods of dealing with stress, whilst women take more emotion-focused methods.
  • Women often use cognitive appraisal to try and think about the stressor more positively.
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Evaluation of explanations

  • All of these explanations demonstrate gender bias.
  • Stress coping methods depend much more on situation and individual characteristics such as personality variables, rather than gender.
  • There are also social and cultural variations.

Vogele et al (1997) - Women vs Men Responding to Anger

Vogele et al (1997) investigated gender-related differences in cardiovascular reactivity and the role of anger inhibition and risk for future hypertension.

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Procedure

  • Quasi experiment (IV was gender).
  • 28 female and 26 male college students with high or low blood pressure were recruited.
  • Blood pressure and heart rate were monitored whilst participants carried out a number of tasks.
  • These included mental arithmetic, interpersonal challenge, a frustrating psychomotor test, and the cold pressor test. Participants also completed inventories assessing trait anxiety, trait anger, anger expression, and Type A personality.
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Results & conclusions

  • Findings
    • Males showed much more reactivity than females in response to the anger suppression tasks.
  • Conclusion
    • Males were more likely to suffer cardiovascular issues and hypertension as a result of stress than females.
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Evaluation

  • Strength
    • Controlled experiment.
    • Practical applications.
  • Limitations
    • Individual differences.
    • Student sample.
    • Social and cultural variation.

Jump to other topics

1Social Influence

2Memory

3Attachment

4Psychopathology

5Approaches in Psychology

6Biopsychology

7Research Methods

8Issues & Debates in Psychology (A2 only)

9Option 1: Relationships (A2 only)

10Option 1: Gender (A2 only)

11Option 1: Cognition & Development (A2 only)

12Option 2: Schizophrenia (A2 only)

13Option 2: Eating Behaviour (A2 only)

14Option 2: Stress (A2 only)

15Option 3: Aggression (A2 only)

16Option 3: Forensic Psychology (A2 only)

17Option 3: Addiction (A2 only)

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