Sex differences in parental nurturance

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 There have been few studies, unfortunately,  of hormonal determination of parental behavior of the nurturant type (grooming,  licking,  carrying,  and the other forms of caring).    Injections of androgens reduce such behaviors in both males and females in those few species which have been studied to date,  namely mice, rats and rabbits.    More research on this theme, in primates,  is needed.   In humans,   indications are piecemeal,  scattered and seem inconclusive to me.   Women masculinized before birth by synthetic hormones administered to the mother have been investigated for maternal interests.   Maternal interests of these women are lower than those of controls.    Transsexual men changed to women report more maternal interests than normal men.   They even fantasize heavily about getting pregnant.  

Are there gender differences in ability to discriminate or express emotion ?   I believe there are huge differences between men and women in the things that interest them,  the emotional investments they choose to make,  and so forth.  I choose to call this domain,  the domain of “affective styles”.  Whether one sex has more “ affective competence ” than the other is an entirely different matter.  It would be inappropriate, I think,  to cover affective styles in this book because they relate less to underlying brain differences between the sexes and they are more difficult to investigate with strong scientific methodology.  However,  I do find that neuroscience has something important to say about the second domain, affective competence.  First,  we need to clarify what we mean by affect.   I propose that there exist three different tiers of affect,  namely mood, emotion and sentiment.   Mood is the more primitive, hereditary, biologically determined.  Mood is a bidimensional psychobehavioral phenomenon:  one’s mood is, at all times,  situated somewhere between dejection (extremely bad mood) and elation (extremely good mood).  Mood is easily manipulable by psychoactive drugs.  Emotion however is a more rapidly occurring and a more differentiated psychic and behavioral response to a situation.  The main emotions are joy, sadness, fear,  anger, disgust, and surprise.   Finally, sentiment is a higher order affective phenomenon, more culturally determined,  more intellectual.   Religiosity,  solidarity,  righteousness are examples of sentiment.

I think it is commonly believed (especially by women) that women are more affectively competent and have more intuition than men.   However, the empirical data in support of these contentions is generally based on self reports.   To get a clearer picture of “affective competence”,  rather than of “affective styles”,  it is important to subject people to objective tests of competence...

Mood is obviously the more privileged form of affect for neurobiological research into gender differences.  I will simply summarize the situation here because I mention sex differences in mood on many occasions throughout the upcoming chapters.  Women are more fragile than men with regard to mood.  In particular,  they are more prone to negative excess which expresses itself in the clinical syndrome termed « depression » (see chapter 11).  There are a limited number of research approaches to emotional competence:  can a person distinguish or express emotion in the voice ?...  in the face ?...  in gestures?...  in words, sentences, paragraphs, jokes?...    I believe the vast majority of investigations of emotional competence have found no evidence of a basic sex difference.   However, there have been a few findings which suggest some sex differences.  One research team (Zuckerman and colleagues) found a female superiority.   In my own research projects on discrimination of facial expressions,  I found sex differences that could best be explained by sex-specific biases, females tending to attribute sadness to faces and men anger,  for example.  This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that the brain hemispheres of men and women seem to be mobilized in different manners in the processing of tachistoscopically presented faces.   Similar sex differences have been reported in tasks requiring discrimination of emotional tones.   But these,  I think,  can best be interpreted as differences in style rather than of overall competence.   And in the dichotic listening implementations of tasks of emotional tone discrimination,  the two sexes again seem to mobilize the brain hemispheres in somewhat different manners.  Finally,  sentiment is such a complex value-laden psychobehavioral process that I feel it is nearly futile to search for neurobiologically based sex differences in this domain.  Some phenomena seen in neurological practice give vague indications of brain mechanisms of sentiment,  but these are piecemeal.  For example,  it has been noted that patients with a certain type of epilepsy (called partial complex epilepsy)  involving foci (the starting points in the brain of electrical convulsive activity) in the temporal lobes can be sanctimonious, moralizing and interpersonally sticky.  This epileptic trait has been termed « pseudoreligiosity ».  If any neurobiologically-based sex difference exists with respect to sentiment,  it would consist of a female superiority.  Indeed,  men are more often subject to extreme forms of immorality and lack of sentimental sophistication,  a condition called psychopathy,  which may be adaptative in a wild environment and anachronistic in post-industrial and highly civilized society (see chapter 11).  However,  in the normal range of expression of sentiment,  I don’t see how it could possibly be argued that one sex is superior   to the other, except on the basis of esthetic preference.  The philosopher Nietsche agued that the wild masculine prototype is more beautiful than the domesticated christian law-abiding female prototype.   I think this is a minority opinion.

Like many people,  I believe that sense of humor is an important social and emotional ability.   Psychologists have studied humor extensively.   Men and women articulate and interpret humor in manners which are qualitatively different.   Men are more prone to engage in humor and they usually claim to appreciate humor more than women do.  However,  tests of the ability to understand humor have generally failed to demonstrate superiority of either sex (Shirley & Gruner, 1989).   This came as a surprise to me,  as I expected a slight superiority of men.

Empathy is a trait which many women seem to claim for themselves.   Hoffman reviewed 16 studies of sex differences in empathy (Hoffman, 1977).   This researcher concluded that women show more vicarious empathy (sponataneously express the same emotion), a form of submission according to ethologists.  However Hoffman also concluded that women show no superiority whatsoever in ability to understand other’s emotions, take other’s perspectives, etc.   Curiously,  in her 1980 review of Hoffman’s work,  Anne Peterson concluded that  «females are more empathetic».  

Rather, I claim that it is important to distinguish emotional styles from emotional abilities.    When abilities are well isolated,   few sex differences are ever observed.   There seems to exist, I think,  a truly persistent myth, denigrating men’s emotional ability,  which calls for vigorous rebuttal.