Kamboj Sunjeev K, Oldfield Lucy, Loewenberger Alana, Das Ravi K, Bisby James, Brewin Chris R
Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 2014 Dec;45(4):421-6. doi: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2014.05.001. Epub 2014 May 15.
Men and women show differences in performance on emotional processing tasks. Sex also interacts with personality traits to affect information processing. Here we examine effects of sex, and two personality traits that are differentially expressed in men and women - instrumentality and communality - on voluntary and involuntary memory for distressing video-footage.
On session one, participants (n = 39 men; 40 women) completed the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which assesses communal and instrumental traits. After viewing film-footage of death/serious injury, participants recorded daily involuntary memories (intrusions) relating to the footage on an online diary for seven days, returning on day eight for a second session to perform a voluntary memory task relating to the film.
Communality interacted with sex such that men with higher levels of communality reported more frequent involuntary memories. Alternatively, a communality × sex interaction reflected a tendency for women with high levels of communality to perform more poorly on the voluntary recognition memory task.
The study involved healthy volunteers with no history of significant psychological disorder. Future research with clinical populations will help to determine the generalizability of the current findings.
Communality has separate effects on voluntary and involuntary emotional memory. We suggest that high levels of communality in men and women may confer vulnerability to the negative effects of stressful events either through the over-encoding of sensory/perceptual-information in men or the reduced encoding of contextualised, verbally-based, voluntarily accessible representations in women.
男性和女性在情绪处理任务中的表现存在差异。性别也会与人格特质相互作用，从而影响信息处理。在此，我们研究性别以及在男性和女性中差异表达的两种人格特质——工具性和社交性——对痛苦视频片段的自愿和非自愿记忆的影响。
在第一阶段，参与者（39名男性；40名女性）完成了贝姆性别角色量表，该量表评估社交性和工具性特质。观看死亡/重伤的影片片段后，参与者在在线日记中记录与该片段相关的每日非自愿记忆（侵入），持续七天，在第八天返回进行与该影片相关的自愿记忆任务。
社交性与性别相互作用，使得社交性水平较高的男性报告的非自愿记忆更频繁。另外，社交性×性别交互作用反映出社交性水平较高的女性在自愿识别记忆任务中的表现往往较差。
该研究涉及无重大心理障碍病史的健康志愿者。未来对临床人群的研究将有助于确定当前研究结果的普遍性。
社交性对自愿和非自愿情绪记忆有不同影响。我们认为，男性和女性较高水平的社交性可能会使个体易受应激事件负面影响，这可能是由于男性对感觉/知觉信息过度编码，或者女性对情境化、基于语言的、可自愿获取的表征编码减少。
