Husbands never remember marital spats and wives never forget. A new study
suggests a reason: Women's brains are wired both to feel and to recall emotions
more keenly than the brains of men. A team of psychologists tested groups of
women and men for their ability to recall or recognize highly evocative
photographs three weeks after first seeing them and found that the women's
recollections were 10 to 15 percentage points more accurate. The study,
appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also used MRIs
to image the subjects' brains as they were exposed to the pictures. It found
that the women's neural responses to emotional scenes were much more active
than the men's. Turhan Canli, an assistant professor of psychology at State
University of New York Stony Brook, said the study shows that a woman's brain
is better organized to perceive and remember emotions. "The wiring of
emotional experience and the coding of that experience into memory is much more
tightly integrated in women than in men," said Canli, the lead author of the
study. "A larger percentage of the emotional stimulin used in the experiment
were remembered by women than by men." The findings are consistent with earlier
research that found differences in the workings of the minds of women and men,
said Diane F. Halpern, director of the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and
Children and a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California.
Halpern said the study makes a strong link between cognitive behavior and a
brain structure that gets activated when exposed to emotional stimulin and she
also said the study advances our understanding of the link between cognition and
the underlying brain structures but it didn't mean that those are immutable and
they couldn't change with experience. Halpern said the study also supports
earlier findings that women, in general, have a better autobiographical memory
for anything, not just emotional events. She said the study supports the folkloric
idea that a wife has a truer memory for marital spats than does her husband.