Gard Marja Germans, Kring Ann M
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
Emotion. 2007 May;7(2):429-37. doi: 10.1037/1528-3542.7.2.429.
Conventional wisdom holds that women are more "emotional" than men. However, research evidence suggests that sex differences in emotion are considerably more complex. The authors tested hypotheses about sex differences in the engagement of the approach and avoidance motivational systems thought to underpin emotional responses. The authors measured reported emotional experience and startle response magnitude both during the presentation and after the offset of emotional stimuli that engage these motivational systems to assess whether men and women differ in their patterns of immediate response to emotional stimuli and in their patterns of recovery from these responses. Our findings indicated that women were more experientially reactive to negative, but not positive, emotional pictures compared to men, and that women scored higher than men on measure of aversive motivational system sensitivity. Although both men and women exhibited potentiation of the startle response during the presentation of negative pictures relative to neutral pictures, only women continued to show this relative potentiation during the recovery period, indicating that women were continuing to engage the aversive motivational system after the offset of negative emotional pictures.
传统观念认为女性比男性更“情绪化”。然而，研究证据表明情绪方面的性别差异要复杂得多。作者对关于接近和回避动机系统参与度的性别差异假说进行了测试，这些动机系统被认为是情绪反应的基础。作者在呈现情绪刺激期间以及这些刺激消失后，测量了所报告的情绪体验和惊吓反应强度，以评估男性和女性在对情绪刺激的即时反应模式以及从这些反应中恢复的模式上是否存在差异。我们的研究结果表明，与男性相比，女性对负面而非正面情绪图片在体验上反应更强烈，并且在厌恶动机系统敏感性测量中得分高于男性。尽管男性和女性在呈现负面图片期间相对于中性图片都表现出惊吓反应的增强，但只有女性在恢复期仍继续表现出这种相对增强，这表明女性在负面情绪图片消失后仍继续激活厌恶动机系统。
