Stress & Gender
Psychology: AQA A Level, topic 14.1.10
The Relationship Between Stress & Gender
Here are biological, cognitive and social explanations for the relationship between stress and gender.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Evaluation
- Strength
- Controlled experiment.
- Practical applications.
- Limitations
- Individual differences.
- Student sample.
- Social and cultural variation.
Test yourself on Stress & Gender
What methods do men and women typically take to dealing with stress?
What are common problems with social, cognitive and biological explanations for the relationship between stress and gender?
What was Vogele et al's (1997) conclusion?