A new study done by researchers under University of Vienna psychologist Claus Lamm reveals males and females respond to stressful situations in virtually opposite ways. Men become more egocentric, while women heighten their ability to understand the perspective of others.
“Social interaction skills improve in women under stress,” the researchers write in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. They specifically found stress spurred women to override normal levels of self-centeredness and respond to others with heightened empathy. The opposite appears to be true of men.
To find out which method predominates, they recruited 40 men and 40 women between the ages of 18 and 40. Half of the participants underwent the not-at-all-fun Trier Social Stress Test, in which they delivered a speech and performed mental arithmetic in front of an audience. The others spent that same amount of time on pleasantly non-stressful activities, such as “easy counting.”
All then performed three tasks intended to measure their ability to distinguish their own feelings and perceptions from those of others. In one, they were instructed to “move objects on a shelf according to the instructions of a director.” Doing so correctly “required participants to disentangle their own visual perspective” from that of the director.
The results were consistent across the board: Stressed women were better than their relaxed counterparts at understanding the perspective of others. For men, however, stress had the opposite effect, diminishing their ability to understand what someone else was thinking or feeling.
The researchers are unsure of the reasons behind the gender divide they discovered. Previous research has found “women are more prone to seek social support in general,” they write. “Thus they might have learned by experience that they receive more support when they are able to relate more accurately to others.”
