Ever wonder why people say that women are better at coping with stress than men? A new study explains why this could actually be true.
Researchers have been saying that men tend to react with the “fight or flight” response, and women are generally less aggressive and turn to the “tend and befriend” response, that is women are more likely to seek out social support instead of lashing out or avoiding the issue completely.
A journal article by State University of New York at Buffalo tells us about a study they created that explains the answer behind the question of why stress responses differ between sexes. The researchers behind this study point out that the Pre-Frontal Cortex region of your brain is the target of stress hormones, cognition, and emotion. This study was tested with 4 weeks old juvenile-adolescent Sprague-Dawley rats, because during this time there PFC region undergoes critical postnatal development. There were various tests that showed how the PFC region can be tested.
One of the tests compared the impact of repeated stress on cognitive functions in young female and male rats. These animals were exposed to 7 days of repeated stress, and examined every 24 hours. It turns out the male rats that were the control spent more time exploring the less recent object in the test trial, whereas the stressed group lost the preference to the less recent object. In contrast, the control and stressed female rats spent more time looking at the less recent object in the test trial.
In addition to the repeated stress on the rats, another test examined the possibility that estrogen influences the impact of stress. Researchers manipulated the amount of estrogen produced in the brain. At the end of it, they found out that when estrogen signaling in female brains was blocked, stress had negative effects on the brain, and when estrogen signaling was activated in male brain, the negative effects of stress were blocked.
Males and females show different biochemical, cellular, and behavioral effects of stress, and they connect this with the PFC. Their results showed, “In contrast to the impaired cognition in male rodents after chronic stress, female rodents show unaffected or enhanced performance on the same memory tasks after the same stress.” In other words, female rats responded better to the chronic stress than male rats.
This experiment has not only helped to discover new ways of treating stress-related disorders in men, but also how they are now able to see sex differences in mental health more broadly. Another study related to this was found was women may cope with stress in better ways, however they internalize stress to a greater degree, and have higher stress levels than males. The only difference is the coping mechanisms between them.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/11/women-handle-stress-better-estrogen-study_n_3579735.html
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~zhenyan/MPs-female+stress.pdf
Reflection:
Overall, writing this new journal article was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I re-read both the scholarly article and the news article again and I thought it was going to be easy to combine both of them to create a new one, however the scholarly article holds too much information to where I can pin-point the main details from the study and put them in the new article. I realized that I had to sacrifice a lot of information that I felt was important for readers to know, but at the same time I know that as a reader myself it is very hard for me to get interested in a certain topic if it holds a lot of scientific information with terms that I do not understand or can’t even pronounce, so I knew that finding only the main details was what I had to do. Also, looking at the journal article from Huffpost, I felt that the article was way too broad for people to gain any kind knowledge on why women handle stress better than men. So I needed to figure out a way to create a new article that is not to broad, but not to much information where the people get bored either. I also now understand how difficult it is for journalists to do this for a living. They have to be able to look and analyze scientific research, but also make sure they do not plagiarize the researchers work, and create it as there own. This project gave a brand new perspective on how research/journal articles actually work and how difficult it is to come up with something brand new.