Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 9, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark.
Psychol Res. 2021 Jun;85(4):1732-1747. doi: 10.1007/s00426-020-01334-z. Epub 2020 Apr 10.
It is well documented that women have an increased risk of emotional disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Such disorders are typically characterized by intrusive memories and rumination of past events, but findings are mixed as to whether women have enhanced access to memories of emotional events. Some studies have found that women, compared with men, report more frequent and more intense memories of emotionally stressful events, whereas other studies have failed to replicate this effect. These conflicting findings may reflect the use of different memory sampling techniques (e.g., retrospective vs. experimental data) and limited control for factors associated with both gender and emotional memory. The purpose of the present study was to investigate gender differences in memory for emotionally negative events, using three different sampling methods, while at the same time controlling for parameters that might co-vary with gender. Consistent with some previous studies, we found that women and men did not differ in their frequencies of emotionally negative involuntary memories. However, women rated their memories as more intense and arousing than men did, and women also reported higher increases in state anxiety after retrieval. Female gender accounted for unique variance in the emotional intensity and subjective arousal associated with negative memories, when controlling for other theoretically derived variables. The findings provide evidence that female gender is associated with a stronger emotional response to memories of negative events, but not that women remember such events more frequently than men do.
有大量文献表明，女性患情绪障碍的风险增加，如焦虑和抑郁。这些障碍通常表现为对过去事件的侵入性记忆和沉思，但关于女性是否更容易回忆起情绪事件，研究结果存在分歧。一些研究发现，与男性相比，女性报告更多且更强烈的情绪压力事件记忆，而其他研究则未能复制这种效应。这些相互矛盾的发现可能反映了使用不同的记忆抽样技术（例如，回顾性与实验数据）以及对与性别和情绪记忆相关的因素的控制有限。本研究的目的是使用三种不同的抽样方法研究情绪负面事件的记忆中的性别差异，同时控制可能与性别共变的参数。与一些先前的研究一致，我们发现女性和男性在情绪负面的非自愿记忆的频率上没有差异。然而，女性对记忆的评价比男性更强烈和更令人兴奋，并且女性在检索后报告的状态焦虑也更高。在控制其他理论衍生变量的情况下，女性性别解释了与负面记忆相关的情绪强度和主观唤醒的独特差异。研究结果表明，女性性别与对负面事件的记忆的更强烈的情绪反应有关，但并非女性比男性更频繁地记住此类事件。
