Brains of anxious women work harder

Michigan State University psychologist Jason Moser believes anxious women’s brains have to work harder.

“My goal is to understand how we can make anxious people have happy, healthier, better functioning lives and it just so happens most of the patients who come to see me or come to participate in my research studies happen to be women. So I’m trying to understand women better in terms of how they relate to anxiety and health.”

In his study, published last month in the International Journal of Psychophysiology, Moser compared the brain activity of 70 male and 79 female university students. All participants were asked to identify the middle letter in a series of five letter groups on a computer screen. Afterward they filled out questionnaires about how much they worry.

The two groups of male and female college students reported the same amount of worry overall. The difference was really in how the anxious women’s brains worked versus the men’s brains overall.

The females who identified themselves as anxious people recorded higher than average brain activity particularly if they made mistakes while performing the task.

In the bigger picture Moser wants to understand why so many women suffer from generalized anxiety disorder. Perhaps women are simply more inclined to report feeling anxious. It makes Moser wonder if the difference can be attribute to hormones.

Moser says there’s ample evidence that male and female brains are structurally the same but different in terms of how they function — especially when it comes to negative emotional events such as loss or trauma.

“It does seem that women’s brains process negative sorts of situations or events more strongly than men.”

Moser also suggests this may in part explain why historically women have shied away from math and sciences.

“There is a lot of literature on stereotype threat,” he says referring to females who do more poorly at math and science because of the stereotype that they are expected to perform poorly.

This looming stereotype creates more pressure and stress which then leads to poor performance — or their brains simply have to work harder because of this extra weight, he says.

“The group that really stood out was the high anxious women,” says Moser. When anxiety is brought to bear on a simple task it interferes with women’s ability to deal effectively when they make mistakes — so their brains work less inefficiently, he says.

“They are pedalling that bicycle faster especially when they make mistakes to achieve the same level of performance that low anxious or high anxious men have to do,” says Moser.

When women are anxious, that anxiety travels with them. But men may not let their anxiety interfere with their performance, he says. Perhaps that is because they don’t care about the task or worried about how well they’re performing, or they are not worrying about what else is going on their lives, he says.

Women’s worry will more likely fall into a category of generalized anxiety disorder — it comes to bear on all sorts of things, he says.

Next, says Moser. “We’re going to look at women’s menstrual cycles — report on their typical cycle length — to get a sense in a rough way whether estrogen levels may be one culprit in explaining why anxious women’s brains respond more strongly to mistakes.”

Moser is anticipating a backlash from feminists — and he’s ready.

“I didn’t think too hard about that because we’re truly interested in observing differences between different types of people no matter who they are. I understand it may be a hot button subject for some people.”

source: thestar