Sex and Gender Exam 3

Intelligence

General capacity to understand ideas, think abstractly, reason, solve problems, and learn; not a specific type of knowledge or expertise

Essentialism

Differences arise from stable, biological individual qualities

Sex Differences in General Mental Ability: Spearman

• General mental ability (g) which is related to performance on all cognitive tasks. Identifiable through factor analysis

• Predicts important outcomes (academic and job performance, health)

  • Stable over the lifespan, genetic, and environmental

• Negligible sex differences found in most studies

D value effect sizes

• Interpreted as reflecting differences that range from close to zero to very large magnitude

• Positive = men score higher

• Negative = women score higher

Sex Differences in Verbal Performance

• Small to moderate female advantage

• Vocal and verbal fluency favor women

• Verbal reasoning favor men

Sex Differences in Quantitative Performance (Math)

• No differences in overall performance

• Small differences in some specific domains

  • Small female advantage in computational

  • Modest male advantage in complex problems

  • Boys outperform girls on standardized math tests

Sex Differences in Mental Rotation Ability

• Essential skill for success in prestigious, male-dominated occupations such as engineering and architecture

• Early review revealed large sex difference favoring boys and men; has decreased overtime (ds = 0.39 and 0.47)

• Male advantage appears in infancy and emerges consistently across cultures

Spatial Perception

Ability to perceive, understand, and remember spatial relations between objects

• Small male advantage in childhood (d = 0.33) that increases to moderate

Spatial Visualization

Ability to mentally manipulate spatial information sequentially, such as imagining what a folded shape will look like when unfolded

• Small average male advantage (ds < 0.20), that do not emerge until the teenage years

Spatial Location Memory

Ability to remember where objects are

• Favors women - small sex difference

• evolutionary explanation: sex-based labor divisions in which ancestral women more often foraged for fruits, vegetables, and roots over large geographic regions

Effects of play preferences in childhood

• Boys tend to play more games that involve hand-eye coordination, such as throwing and catching balls

• They play video games more often that require them to manipulate and navigate three-dimensional worlds

• Research: Spatial skills training improved spatial performance for both male and female participants

Preliminary evidence on prenatal exposure:

• Female fetuses exposed to unusually high levels of androgens (masculinizing hormones) later exhibited better spatial performance and mental rotation ability

Greater male variability hypothesis

• First formally proposed by Havelock Ellis in 1894, dates back to Charles Darwin

• Men show greater variability in cognitive performance

• Sex differences are more pronounced in high and low tails of distributions

• Researchers in 19th century noted disproportionate numbers of men in homes for intellectually challenged

Learning disabilities and developmental disorders

Boys more likely than girls to receive diagnoses of learning disabilities and developmental disorders

• Dyslexia: impairments in reading, such as difficulties with word recognition and spelling

• Autism Spectrum Disorder

• Down’s Syndrome

Various contextual factors and individual difference variables

(Why is there variance in cognitive performance?”

• Unequal access to high-quality education

• Some approach high-stakes testing situations as an exciting challenge while others feel anxious

• High test scores but poor grades: some people may feel at ease taking a standardized test but have little motivation to work consistently in school

Math Anxiety

• Experienced more by girls and women

  • Boys across the globe report somewhat more positive attitudes and feelings about math than girls

• Self-reinforcing loop: Anxiety produces lower math achievement, and poor math performance produces anxiety; relates to lower math achievement

• Stereotype threat: Anxiety due to risk of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group

Math Anxiety: Impact of teacher and parent anxieties

Impact of teacher’s anxiety:

• Teachers’ math anxieties predicted lower math performance for girls by the end of the year

Impact of parent’s anxieties:

• Math-anxious parent assisting with homework can lead to kids developing math anxiety themselves

Sex differences in achievement motivation and sensitivity to feedback

No sex differences in persistence at tasks

• Achievement motivation: individuals’ need to meet goals and accomplish tasks

• No evidence that girls are more likely to give up after academic failures

• Some studies find that girls show higher intrinsic motivation for school in general while boys show greater work avoidance

Politcal Correctness

The social norm, often viewed as taken to an extreme that people avoid language or acts that might offend, marginalize, or exclude members of socially disadvantaged groups

Whorfian or Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

The structure of language determines of nature of the speaker’s thoughts and worldview

Gender Exclusive, Gender Inclusive, Diminutive, and Gender Neutral Language

Gender Exclusive: Mailman, policeman, freshman, mankind, brotherhood, you guys (to refer to mixed-sex groups)

Gender Inclusive: mail carrier, police officer, first-year student, humanity, friendship, you all, you

Diminutive: Actress, authoress, stewardess, girls (to refer to adult women)

Gender Neutral: Actor, author, flight attendant, women

Diminutives and Gender Labels

• Adding gendered suffixes to neutral words:

  • Nouns feminized

  • Heroines, actress, hostess

• Qualifiers may suggest subtle power differences (differs from the male norm)

• Diminutive: word indicating a smaller, less powerful, or more familiar version (duckling, booklet)

Use of Language in Social Issues

• People use passive voices more frequently to describe instances of sexual domestic violence with male, rather than female perpetrators

  • e.g., “she was beat” instead of “he beat her”

• People sometimes invent new words and phrases to legitimize experiences or raise awareness about social issues (Me Too)

• People also sometimes transform the meaning of words, which happens when members of a stigmatized group reclaim a derogatory label and use it in an empowering way, even though the practice is controversial (queer)

  • Reclaiming

• Different cultures approach: the belief that boys and girls are socialized to use language so differently that they may as well come from different “cultures,” which leads to miscommunication

Affective vs Instrumental Communication

• Girls and women are presumed to develop an affective communication style that is emotionally expressive and oriented toward maintaining relationships

• Boys and men are presumed to develop an instrumental communication style that is informational and oriented towards problem solving and completing tasks

Who talks more?

• Women are stereotyped as more talkative than men

• Holleran recorded people’s spontaneous conversations in their daily lives using small digital voice recorders and compared word use of men and women

  • Sex differences in talkativeness are often small and depend on contextual factors

Who interrupts more?

• Women tend to interrupt more in ways that build rapport (agreement, adding on)

• Men tend to interrupt more often in ways that dominate and control the conversation

Gossip

• Conversations, often of a personal nature, about someone who is not present, as primarily negative

• Serves as primary means of learning:

  • Enforcing a group’s moral norms and enhancing social bonds

• Used as a form of relational aggression:

  • Subtle aggression, usually committed when the target is not physically present, that is intended to harm the target’s social relationships or status

• Associated with women more than men:

  • People who lack social status may use gossip as a way of gaining power when they are blocked from other routes to power

Code Switching

Switching between languages or dialects based on the environmental context

• e.g., transgender people in Tonga using English when expressing resistance to identity because of different cultural meaning systems)

Sex Differences in Male and Female Speech

• Women tend to use more emotional and warm language and talk about others more often

• Men tend to be more argumentative, use more intrusive interruptions, and discuss objects more often

• Variables that assert differences vary based on the demographic characteristics of the samples

• Stereotypes and differences in communication:

  • Differences tend to be small and similarities outweigh differences

Eye Contact and Visual Dominance

• Women tend to gaze more than men do and the highest amount of mutual eye contact tends to occur among pairs of women

• Men told to look at their female interaction partners more while speaking to them and to look away more while listening to them. This pattern is known as visual dominance

• Women look at their male interaction partners more when listening than they do when speaking

Body Posture and Gait

• Body posture in nonverbal communication

  • People perceive those who assume an expensive posture that takes up space as more socially dominant; may give the person feelings of power and confidence

• Manspreading

  • The tendency of men to spread out

  • Women more frequently assume a restrictive body posture taking up less space

  • Both women and men may benefit from manspreading, especially when trying to attract or impress others

• Gait and gender differences

  • The way people walk

  • Perceive walking with swaying hips as feminine and walking with swaggering shoulders as masculine

  • People can usually tell the sex of a walker even with very minimal cues

  • Can also identify a walker’s sexual orientation based on gender-atypical giats (a cue for the identification of sexuality)

Emotional Experience and Expression

• Differences of emotions in girls and boys

  • Girls and women report experiencing more affiliative and vulnerable emotions, boys and men report experiencing more anger and pride

• People’s self report influenced by gender roles and stereotypes

  • Sex differences do not always hold up when researchers use different methods, such as physiological indices or naturalistic observations

• Nature and nurture: the role of socialization in sex differences in emotions

  • Parents, peers, and teachers

    • Girls and boys tend to display differences in temperament early in infancy, these differences are later affected by socialization agents such as parents, peers, and teachers

    • May encourage boys more than girls to dampen their emotions as a way of regulating their high arousal and activity levels

    • Internalization: girls may receive encouragement to express affiliative emotions, such as sympathy and warmth, and to avoid conflict by directing negative emotions inward instead of outward

  • Children’s peer groups and play patterns:

    • Boys tend to display more rough-and-tumble play in larger groups while girls display more cooperative play in smaller groups

    • Rough-and-tumble play encourages the expression of competitive emotions, such as anger and aggressiveness, while cooperative play encourages the expression of rational emotions, such as happiness and nurturance

Finding’s of meta-analysis: Emotional Experience and Expression

Girls tend to show more other-oriented positive emotions (e.g., sympathy) and inward-focused negative emotions (e.g., fear and shame) than boys, whereas boys tend to show more outward-focused emotions (e.g., anger) than girls (Externalization)

Encoding and Decoding Accuracy

• Encoding accuracy: ability to communicate nonverbally in a clear manner that others can interpret correctly

• Decoding accuracy: ability to read nonverbal communication

• Gender differences in encoding and decoding accuracies: women tend to have an advantage over men in both types of accuracy

Sexual Response Cycle

• One pattern for men, at least 3 for women

1. Excitement (stimulation)

2. Plateau (intensified excitement)

3. Orgasmic (release of physical and psychological tension)

4. Resolution (return to relaxation)

5. Refractory period (a time during which men are temporarily unable to be aroused)

Neurotransmitters during sex

• Dopamine: facilitates arousal and orgasm

• Serotonin: inhibits arousal and orgasm

  • Sexual side effects of SSRIs

Senses During Sex: Touch

• Primary erogenous zones: parts of the body with many nerve endings (e.g., genitals, breatss)

• Secondary erogenous zones: areas that become erotically sensitive via conditioning

Senses During Sex: Vision

• Cultural standards determine what is attractive

• Belief that men are more visually aroused than women may be incorrect

  • Women demonstrated genital arousal in response to a wider range of erotic stimuli than men

  • However, there is a substantial debate about what genital arousal measures in women are capturing

Senses During Sex: Smell

• Sexually arousing scents are partly a function of cultural standards and prior learning

• Scents may affect us unconsciously via pheromones (i.e., chemicals that transmit sexual signals)

  • Participants in a study who wore pheromones daily had more sex than those who wore a placebo solution

• Lower odor sensitivity linked to sexual difficulties

Senses During Sex: Hearing

• Variable role across persons

• Female copulatory vocalizations: facilitate heterosexual men’s organs

Senses During Sex: Taste

• Variable role across persons

• Intertwined with sense of smell

Testosterone’s Influence on Sexual Arousal

• Testosterone is secreted by gonads and adrenal glands

• Affects sexual arousal in both men and women

• Low levels of testosterone (e.g., as a result of hypogonadism, oophorectomy, etc.) can be treated with testosterone replacement therapy

• Drugs that block testosterone sometimes given to sex offenders (“chemical castration”)

Estrogen’s Influence on Sexual Arousal

• Secreted by gonads and adrenal glands

• Research suggests it may play a joint role with testosterone in producing sexual arousal in both men and women

Oxytocin’s Influence on Sexual Arousal

• Manufactured in the brain

• Plays a role in bonding between sexual and romantic partners

• Case studies find that oxytocin seems to facilitate sexual arousal

• Oxytocin is a ocmplex hormone with more than one effect

The Excitement Phase

• Marked by increased blood flow to the genital tissue (e.g., erection, swelling)

• Sex flush may occur in some

• Lengths vary across person and situations

The Plateau Phase

• Tensions become more pronounced

• An extension of excitement (some scholars make no distinction between these phases)

• Cowper’s secretion occurs in men; orgasmic platform develops in women

• Lasts a few seconds to a few minutes

The Orgasm Phase

• Contraction of muscles in the genital region

• Usually coincides with ejaculation in men (sometimes in women too)

• Orgasm typically follows plateau for men; somewhat less likely for women

• Usually highly pleasurable

The Resolution Phase

• Return to non-aroused states

• People’s behaviors vary widely during this stage

• Postcoital dysphoria: inexplicable tearfulness, sadness, or irritability following what is otherwise consensual, satisfying sex

Models of Sexual Response: The Triphasic Model

• Helen Singer Kaplan

• Attempt to infuse more psychology into the Masters and Johnson approach

• 3 stages: desire, excitement, orgasm

  • Desire stage is controversial because desire does not necessarily have to precede sexual response

• Configured so as to be more applicable to sex therapy

  • Resolution phase dropped because it is rare to have problems in this stage

Models of Sexual Response: The Erotic Stimulus Pathway Theory

• David Reed

• An even more psychologically-based theory

• 4 stages: seduction, sensations, surrender, reflection

• Focuses on cognitive changes that occur at each step

Solitary Sexual Behaviors: Asexuality and Calibacy

• Asexuality: Lack of desire for partnered sex. Best considered a sexual orientation

• Celibacy: Refraining from