Do women experience a change of feelings more often? According to a new study, this theory belongs to the realm of gender myths. The emotional situation of women does not fluctuate on average than that of men, a team led by Alexander Weigard from the University of Michigan reports to the »Scientific Reports«.
The psychologist and his colleagues interviewed 142 young adults daily for 75 days about their condition. How much did they feel happy, upset, anxious, or irritable? A list of ten positive and ten negative emotions was queried. The researchers determined the fluctuation range of feelings and the emotional constancy over two days as well as regularly recurring ("cyclical") feelings. For evaluation, they calculated the so-called Bayesian factor: It indicates how likely one hypothesis is compared to another. A Bayesian factor from 3 is considered moderate evidence, from 10 as strong evidence.
Result: The available data was around three times more likely assuming that there were actually no differences between the sexes. There were also little evidence that women with a natural cycle differed from those who hormonally controlled. Here the data also fitted better to assume that the women's groups experienced comparable emotional fluctuations. However, women who had triphasic hormone preparations seemed to be emotionally somewhat "carrier" and rather cyclical, regular fluctuations.
According to Weigard and his colleagues, this fits with previous findings that the emotional gradient is weaker with hormonal contraception than in the course of a natural monthly cycle. Women report increased negative mood in the days before and during the period (with lower estrogen and progesterone levels).
Females were neglected in research for a long time because there were feared, cyclical hormone fluctuations could affect their behavior and thus falsify the results. But wrongly, as the research group reports. A meta -analysis of over 300 studies could hardly demonstrate differences between the reactions of male and female rats, neither in behavior nor in neurochemical or electrophysiological dimensions.
For a final judgment, the present sample is too small and too limited to young, white adults with an academic background, write the researchers themselves. There is a need for a broader database and also finer measurements, for example in an hourly instead of daily rhythm. They therefore do not yet want to rule out small differences between the sexes. Her conclusion, however, is: "If the influence of sex hormones in everyday life were as significant as thought, then one would have had to see clearer differences."
