Gender differences in coping with stress Flashcards
What did Taylor find
Taylor et al. (2000) found that there are gender differences in the way males and females respond to stress.
Acute stress produces the ‘fight-or-flight’ response in males, but women may experience the ‘tend and befriend’ response as well.
Wat can tend and befriend be defined as
“a behaviour exhibited by some animals, and humans, in response to threat. It refers to the protection of offspring (tending) and seeking out the social group for mutual defence (befriending)”
Why is ‘tend and befriend’ a more adaptive response for females? Consider differences in parental investment.
This is thought to be an adaptive response in females because they are more invested in their offspring (having carried them for 9 months; limited opportunities to conceive etc.) and so prioritise their survival.
In females, oxytocin promotes:
Nurturing and co-operation.
Feelings of bonding with others and general social-ness.
What might prevent oxytocin from having the same effect amongst males?
In males, testosterone levels can rise when stressed.
Testosterone has a dampening effect on oxytocin.
Males can become aggressive (due to testosterone) as a result of stress (‘fight’).
Lazarus and Folkman (1984) distinguished between two different coping styles for dealing with stress:
Problem- focused coping
Emotion-focused coping
what is Problem- focused coping give an example
A way to cope with stress by taking control and tackling the factor(s) causing the stress, often in a practical way, by directly and actively coping in some way to reduce the impact of the stressor.
Example: For example, you are getting stressed with the pressure of exams so you write a revision timetable, rather than ignoring the stress and playing computer games.
what is Emotion- focused coping give an example
A more passive way to cope with stress by tackling the symptoms of stress, for example the anxiety that accompanies stress. This can involve cognitive strategies such as denial (e.g. avoiding the stressor) or distraction or behavioural strategies by finding ways of venting the emotion (e.g. crying, anger, smoking).
Matud (2004)
Assessed gender differences in stress and coping strategies in 2,816 people.
Found women rated stressful life events as more negative and less controllable than men.
They also noted differences in the types of stressors (women = family/health, men = financial/work), which affected their coping styles.
Women used more emotional avoidance styles (emotion-focused coping) whereas men were more emotionally inhibited.
They concluded that women cope less well with stress due to negative emotion-focused coping strategies.
However, men’s inability to express emotions could have long-term health impacts.
Evaluation of research into gender differences in coping with stress
Females don’t always respond with tend and befriend
Taylor et al. recognised that whilst males are generally more aggressive in response to stress compared to females, females are aggressive in situations requiring defence e.g. towards an intruder who threatens their offspring.
Also, if the offspring are mobile, then they will flee as opposed to staying huddled together.
Therefore, ‘tend-and-befriend’ is too simple an explanation, because in reality there are a number of strategies employed by females that are adapted to their high levels of parental investment and the strategy used will depend on the type of threat posed
Challenging Research: Tamres et al. (2014)
Assessed evidence from several different studies to find that females use a wider variety of coping strategies and are more likely to seek social support to deal with stressors.
Females were also more likely to engage in negative emotion-focused coping strategies, which explains why they tended to perceive stressors as more severe than males did.
Lack of research support for different coping strategies
There is insufficient evidence to support the idea that men are more problem-focused and women are more emotion-focused when coping with stress.
For example, Hamilton and Fagot (1988) assessed male and female undergraduates over an eight-week period and found no evidence of gender differences with regard to coping strategies.
Other research suggests that there are more than two coping strategies.
Dividing the way that people cope with stress by gender is simplistic and may create self-fulfilling prophecies.
This means that individuals could react in the way that they think they ought to according to their gender.
There are many individual differences between people (e.g. personality…type A, B, C, hardiness), meaning that many will not cope with stress in gender-stereotypical way.
Methodological Issues: Use of self-report measures
Self-report measures are prone to bias.
They often rely on retrospective recall of events, which can be unreliable - individuals struggle to recall events accurately and are often affected by their mood on the day when completing the scale – the more stressed, the more likely that recall will be negative.
How might males and females differ in terms of their willingness to reveal how they cope with stress when completing a self-report scale?
A difference may appear in the results because women may be more willing to reveal the emotional side of coping, whereas men may play down their emotional difficulties.
This means there may be no real differences in coping style (social desirability bias).
