Expectant Fathers

Lesson 3: What Are the Facts Regarding Expectant Dad Behavior...Affairs?

More on the Essential Difference of Men and Women

Here are the directions to score the test. Use the following point scores for (a), (b), and (c) responses depending on gender, male or female. Total the number of points for all the answers given and read the interpretation given below.

Males score
(a) 10 points
(b) 5 points
(c) -5 points

Female score
(a) 15 points
(b) 5 points
(c) -5 points

Most males will score between 0 and 60.

Most females will score between 50 and 100.

The overlap – scores between 50 and 60 – indicates a thought compatibility between sexes.

Male scores below 0 and female scores above 100 indicates that the opposite sexes are differently ‘wired’ in their brain patterns…but differences also attract. Male scores above 60 may show a brain sex bias to the female. Females who score below 50 may show a brain sex bias to the male.

However, all such differences are average differences. A male might score above 60 and still possess a male brain. A female might score below 50 and still possess a female brain. There are deeper differences than can show up in such a simple test.

The quiz developed by Anne Moir and David Jessel is fun to do and it can certainly starts lively conversations. However, I can’t vouch for the accuracy or interpretation of the scores. But there are excellent research findings supporting their statements that men and women show differences in their brain organization and processes.

A study which was reported at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Los Angeles (1998) indicated that motherhood may make women smarter as hormones released during pregnancy and nursing dramatically enrich parts of the brain involved in learning and memory. As astounding as it may seem, the researchers further reported the changes may be permanent!

Emotions are based in the lower region of the brain, an area larger in women than men. This may explain why women are better at relationship building skills than men. A larger lower brain area would also explain why women generally feel and express emotions more readily, visually and verbally than men. It also implies that men have difficulty accessing their feelings and emotions as easily as women. “The difference in visible expression of emotion is one of the biggest trouble spots between men and women,” writes Jane Sanders in Gender Smart.

In still another study reported in USA Today (2002), a team of psychologists using brain scans discovered that women’s brains are better organized to perceive and remember emotions. Turhan Canli, Assistant Professor of Psychology at State University of New York – Stony Brook, is quoted as saying, “The wiring of emotional experience and coding of that experience into memory is much more tightly integrated in women than in men.” So it isn’t coincidence that you are more likely to remember a disagreement with your husband from several years ago.

Based on the USA report, you’re more likely to hold grudges, recall old arguments, and may be more susceptible to clinical depression as a result of dwelling on and reviewing memories. Given that women out number men 10 to 1 with a diagnosis of depression, having a better emotional memory can be a risk factor.

The difference in communication styles between men and women is further confused by social conditioning. Again, Jane Sanders lists the following gender based social attributes for the sexes.

MEN

• Strength, aggressiveness
  
• Competition and superiority
  
• Independence
  
• Hiding and denying emotions
  
• Brief and focused
  

WOMEN

• Strong desire for monogamous relationships
  
• Consensus, harmony, conflict avoidance
  
• Attention to detail; fine motor skills
  
• Strong verbal and social skills
  
• Highly developed intuitive and people-reading skills
  

Where did you and your husband acquire your social attributes and expectations? Like most behavioral patterns, the roots may be found in your childhoods. Visit a playground and watch the various aged children at play. As John Gottman describes it in Why Marriages Succeed or Fail,

“The way you interacted with your playground friends can strongly affect how well you communicate with your relationship partner today. The reason: the playground behavior of boys and girls has always been, and still is, vastly different. In fact, our (childhood) upbringing couldn’t be a worse training ground for a successful relationship.” (p. 139)

In spite of the best efforts of progressive teachers and childhood experts, boys continue to associate with boy friends and girls with girl friends. If you take a mixed group of 5th graders on a field trip, the boys will group among themselves, openly excluding the girls from their circle. And girls make it very clear that they don’t want to be in the circle anyway. In any situation involving more than two gendered children, you’ll find that girls prefer walking together instead of running, holding hands instead of shoving each other around, talking instead of yelling, and being clean instead of getting enough dirt on themselves to be another planet.

This normal segregation of the sexes among youngsters is partly biological as we’ve seen. But the social conditioning you received from family, same sex friends, and role models shape much of your personality and gender difference. While becoming a woman or a man, your subconscious was soaking up the messages about your particular sex and future role as an adult. Children are actually exaggerations of adults in their behavior; or if you prefer, adults are simply better socialized children.

You see this in the overly aggressive boy when he becomes the overly aggressive man. He may not shove, yell, intimidate, or insult his buddies in the same way as when he was 12 years old, but you’ll see many of the same behaviors in him throughout his life. Again, John Gottman says it best in his book Why Marriages Succeed or Fail,

“Men are by and large reluctant to dive head first into emotional issues. But why are they so resistant to talking about their feelings? Much of the answer seems to lie in the vast gulf between what men and women learn about intimacy as children. In a nutshell, boys typically are not taught the skills necessary to navigate through the shifting emotional tides of an intimate relationship while girls are given intense schooling on the subject. Like a person thrown overboard without first being taught how to swim, the average man is understandably fearful of drowning in the same whirlpool of emotions that a woman easily glides through every day. Add to this some compelling evidence that men also have a stronger physiological reaction to certain emotions than do women and it becomes easy to understand why the world of feelings is by and large outside most men’s’ comfort zone.”

And, “From early childhood, boys learn to suppress their emotions while girls learn to express and manage the complete range of feelings. Small wonder that by the time they grow up, meet, and marry, men and women are so often at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the importance they place on expressing feelings. A man is more likely to equate being emotional with weakness and vulnerability because he has been raised to do rather than to voice what he feels. Meanwhile, women have spent their early years learning how to verbalize all kinds of emotions.” (p. 143)

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