ApsieGuy wrote:
I notice that women Neurotypicals seem to be more emotional and more likley to hold grudges than male Neurotypicals.
I guess it has to do with the female brain being more emotionally wired vs logically wired......
I don't think NT women are more emotional than NT men. I think this perception comes about for multiple reasons.
1. Men tend to express negative emotions as anger and are less likely to express this anger vocally. Historically anger is often overlooked as an emotion, though I see no reason for it not to be considered an emotion.
2. Women experience fluctuations in hormone levels. Only a minority of women are profoundly emotionally affected by this to the extent that they become excessively emotional and irrational. I do not believe that the increase in emotional expressiveness/vulnerability of women due to hormone changes exceeds the emotional expressiveness and vulnerability of that as men. In fact I believe women are more consistently less emotional. When women experience hormone based heightened emotions it's because the hormone levels in their bodies have become more similar to that of men.
3. The intellect of women has historically been dismissed as inferior in the not so distant past and perfectly intelligent women were frequently subjected to disrespect that men did not have to deal with. Of course anyone would get upset under these conditions. I do not believe a man would be any less upset if society considered his mind juvenile without even giving his thoughts, ideas, and perspectives serious consideration and he was constantly talked down to and treated as a child. Women have historically responded to such treatment verbally, by attempting to argue their point. I think the only difference would be that men would respond in a more physical way. But the level of emotion would be the same.
3. I do not believe your concept of logically wired and emotionally wired is accurate. There are two sets of circuitry within the brain. One represents a conscious system and the other a subconscious system.
For most of us, when we're asked to perform a complicated math problem in out head, we use conscious analytical thinking. We consciously go through a step by step process in our head, while our subconscious only contributes little bits of information.
When a savant such as Daniel Tammet considers such a problem, his subconscious does most of the work. He doesn't really have to think about it in the sense you and I do.
His conscious mind does not go through much of a reasoning process. It doesn't have to, because his subconscious did.
Women may use a subconscious reasoning process more frequently than a conscious reasoning process because women historically have been tasked with raising children. Children can have rather poor communication skills and women had to have the ability to figure out what children needed in lieu of that child being able to speak or communicate effectively. The subconscious takes in more information than the conscious mind and because it can consider more variables, in the context of child rearing it is likely superior to conscious reasoning. You have likely heard the phrase "Women's intuition". Women frequently were also in polygamous marriages and had a lot of politics to deal with from other women. I believe the subconscious mind is responsible for social reasoning and interpreting complex social interaction.
This is what those of us with AS have a massive issue with.
Likewise, men historically were not involved in child rearing to such an extent. The tasks men historically performed were best carried out by the conscious mind, where multi-step processes had to be considered.
So I don't think that women are more emotional and less logical than men as a whole. I think, in general, the brain of each sex is most geared towards handling situations which they were historically faced with.
I don't think NT women hold grudges more than men either. I almost agreed with you for a second but then I gave it some thought. Consider this. When men are upset with eachother they tend to settle the issue one of three ways.
1. A few short angry words and then avoidance.
2. A one time display of physical violence, and then avoidance.
3. Talk it out (most common when two friends get upset with eachother)
This is because historically men generally were not dependent on other men, with the exception of bosses and Lords, who they didn't have to live with, and most other conflicts with other men were in the form of warfare, which got settled in a rather straight forward way.
Women, on the other hand, were most likely to have to live in a household with other women, and usually occupied some position in the domestic hierarchy. For example, in many cultures, the 1st wive had the most power while the 3rd wife had the least. The 3rd wife had to answer to her husband and all of his other wives, and she was dependent on them for nearly all of her support as her family typically would not take her back should the marriage fail.
It was these other wives, or even just the other women in the village, amongst whom she had to share communal tasks with, that she was most likely to come into conflict with. Since she was dependent on them, she could not just deal with the other woman how a man would deal with another man. She more or less had to keep as many women as she could on her side. Likewise, those who were her enemies, she could not dispose of by murder for much the same reasons. So women had to deal with these situations in a passive aggressive nature and part of this strategy involves holding grudges. By doing this the woman generally demands the other woman submit to her, because she cannot eliminate her by killing her and stands to gain power by this other woman's submission. So holding a grudge is really just a way of a woman coping with adversity in lieu of the fact she could not go about it like a man.
Of course women today are nothing thinking this in their heads any more than men are thinking they want to have sex to spread their DNA. No man thinks "God, I really want to spread my DNA," he thinks "Man I want to do that chick! Lots of chicks!"
So we kind of act how we have evolved to act whether we consciously intend to or not, and whether or not the reasons for it are still valid.
29 Sep 2010, 11:53 pm
