Video Game Preferences

Professor of Gambling Studies Mark Griffith discussed his research into gender differences in video game preferences in a recent column for MCVUK (2007), a magazine on computer and video game marketing. Griffith stresses in the article that high realism and rapid advancement were important to both men and women in video games. Griffith also states that women are more likely to enjoy fantasy and cartoonish video games, while men are more likely to enjoy games with explicit realism based on factual events. Multiplayer competition was also more important to men.

In Griffith's published research (list from his website), these gender patterns aren't as clear. Chumbley and Griffiths (2006) found no gender effects in the "excitement" or "frustration" felt by players during a driving game. Wood et al (2004) is probably the study upon which the MCVUK column is based. While preference for cartoonish graphics was significantly more likely to appear in women, a minority of women actually liked cartoonish games. The preference for fantasy scenarios among women did not reach statistical significance.

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It cracks me up that Griffith's research interests are in gambling and gaming addictions (includling video game addiction) but he writes for marketing magazines. "Yup, here's how to get people addicted!" I'm sure that's not his intent, but it amused me.

So, I do think there are differences in video game preferences between men and women. I have never been a big enough gamer to notice a difference in my personal preferences pre- and post-transition, but I think it's safe to say I prefer "feminine-type" games. I prefer puzzles to combat, I can't stand vehicle simulations, and I'm not a big fan of player vs. player competition. Okay, that last bit is because I lose. Losing sucks.

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Laughter and Relationships

Both men and women rate "sense of humor" as important in their dating choices. However, as Bressler et al (2006) found, they don't mean the same things. Bressler found that when men look for a "sense of humor" in a woman, they want a woman who appreciates their jokes. A woman wants a man who will make her laugh. Humor production and appreciation, according to Bressler, are differentially important to the genders in assortative mating. Priest and Thein (2003) point out that similar senses of humor are key to the survival of a marriage.

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There's a "factoid" circulating (I've been looking for a citation) that children laugh 300 times per day while adults only laugh 15-20 times daily. I mentioned it to my partner, commenting that I probably laugh more than 300 times per day. He grinned and lovingly said "I know." We frequently talk about how important silliness is to our relationship, but it wasn't until this conversation that I really appreciated how much the laughter was important to him. I know I need both production and appreciation out of my partners. I probably want appreciation more.

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Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight

Psychologist Shelly Taylor said "it was like a big light went on" in regards to her model of female coping (Azar, 2000). Taylor et al's 2000 model suggests that while "fight-or-flight" may be the physiological response for both males and females in response to stress, behavior tells a different story. Taylor's model, based in evolutionary psychology, notes that challenges faced by women, especially those with a "maternal investment in offspring", call for different reactions. Taylor's 2000 review provides many animal and human examples of affiliative behavior in animals under stress. A response by Geary and Flinn (2000) does not question the theoretical framework of Taylor's review, but points out that men also show affiliative behavior, and that humans are especially prone to male parental investment, making animal comparisons less important to understanding these patterns.

Several experiments have sought empirical support for Taylor's theoretical model. Ennis et al (2001) found gender differences in the release of cortisol for different kinds of stress. Turton and Campbell (2005) found that women selected tend/befriend options more often than men in a small forced-choice experiment (n = 40). Most recently, Wang et al (2007) used fMRI in conjunction with cortisol-level testing to determine that stress reactions lasted longer in women, and affected different areas of the brain, with women's stress showing greatest activation in the parts of the brain "primarily involved in emotion" (ScienceDaily, 2007).

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Honestly, when the "fight" response has kicked in for me, I can't say it's been adaptive. I don't think I've ever picked a fight I could win. It's probably for the best. I'd like to clarify, in case it looks like Taylor is saying that women never have the "fight-or-flight" response; that doesn't seem to be her point. However, Taylor is suggesting that this response is of limited utility, and that another response could be more helpful.

My responses to stress usually piss me off, but in that ever-so-feminine internalizing way. I get more angry with myself for my uselessness than with anything else for thwarting me. Prior to transition, it was rare for me to feel properly angry at all. "Frustrated" was a better description. My relationship with anger has been one of the few emotional changes that I've really noticed since transition, and it's easier for me to deal with it now. That's a good thing, since I'm dealing with it a lot more often.

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Blogging personalities

Guadagno et al (2007) compared internet usage with an eye to the Big Five personality traits. In their first experiment (n = 89), no significant gender effects were found. The trait of "openness" predicted blogging. However, when the experiment was replicated (n = 278), a relationship between the "neuroticism" trait and gender was found: high neuroticism women were more likely to blog than low neuroticism women - a relationship absent in men.  

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Well, according to a test by outofservice.com, I score higher on neuroticism than any of the other "big five" traits. I'm not surprised - I'm one of the world's born worriers.  I have no idea how much more than normal I update my blog.  In the first experiment, Guadagno found that 9% of respondents updated a blog daily, but in the replication, this number was 27%.  I have to wonder how much time had passed between the first and second experiment.  The popularity of blogging could have significantly changed in a college population if there was as much as six months between experiments.

Honestly, I'm highly skeptical of these results and of the "Big Five" as a construct, but it's interesting to think about implications if these results are accurate. If women who are low in neuroticism don't blog, but men from across the neuroticism spectrum do, then gendered analysis of blog content (see tag=blogs) is going to show severe sampling bias. I don't think any of us should be surprised by this, but it's a nice reminder to be wary of generalizing internet research to the general public. 

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Response on HIV/Stigma/Culture

I received a response from an author I cited during APHA week (Rojas, 2007) that I wanted to share with you. As I mentioned in the original post, Rojas found that Latino men were more likely to answer stigma questions about HIV correctly than Latino women. Here is Rojas' clarification:

There were 376 college community members (not only college students) in the study I presented at APHA. All participants were Latinos/Hispanics. Stigma questions: questions measuring stigma were formulated in such a way that responding correctly to the stigma questions means having less stigma. In other words, multiple choice answers were provided. In the same manner males were found to have less HIV related stigma (meaning that they provided the "correct" not stigmatizing answer to the question.

Another clarification: 50% of the participants documented stigmatizing views regarding HIV/AIDS. Also males were found to have less stigma, they were 49% more likely to have less stigmatizing views (or answering correct) of HIV/AIDS.

This is a short answer to your question. But I hope it clarifies your question. If you have any other questions, please let me know. Good luck with your Web log. I respect your interest on public health. (personal correspondence, P Rojas, 11/24/2007)

EDIT: Actually, I just found Swendeman (2006): Swendeman found that young women living with HIV were more likely to feel shame than young men. This seems related to my comments below.

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I'm still troubled by the idea that stigma - which seems to me to be opinion questions - can have "correct" or "incorrect" answers, but that's hardly the important part of Rojas' finding. It's extremely interesting to me that women were so much more likely to stigmatize HIV in this sample. I have no idea what would cause this effect, since it's so unlike the usual results we see where women are more empathetic. The only explanation I can think of ties in with a post from March (Beliefs about Health Risks) where it was suggested that women may take a more moralistic view towards many illnesses.

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Female Cooks and Male Chefs

Why is it that cooking, a traditionally female field, is dominated at the top levels by men? The popularity of "celebrity chefs" (mostly men) has recently garnered attention in the media. Mike Weiss (2007) in the San Francisco Chronicle calls women's cooking "more memorable, more comforting" than men's cooking. Weiss quotes chef Joyce Goldstein's theory on gender differences in the kitchen:

"Listen, there are two kinds of cooks, there's mama cooks and show-off cooks," said the doyenne of San Francisco women chefs. "Now, not all mama cooks are women but all the show-off cooks are men. Boys with chemistry sets. Boy food is about: 'Look at me!' "

The "chemistry set" theory comes up again in an uncredited feature in New York Magazine (2007). Sara Jenkins says

"I look at this whole molecular-gastronomy thing, and I’m like, “Boys with toys.” They’re just fascinated with technology and chemistry sets.

However, the New York chefs seem to agree that a big part of the problem is money. Men simply have more access to investors and have less difficulty asking for money when the opportunity presents itself.

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My father could not cook. I was continuously regaled with horror stories about his dietary habits in college, and his attempts to feed himself ranged from the pathetic to the hysterical. My mother, on the other hand, was extremely proud of her cooking, and still considers meals to be a sacrament. I will usually insist, when asked, that I can't cook. The truth of the matter is that routine feedings bore the crap out of me. I want to show off. I want to create. Most of all, I have no interest whatsoever in following instructions. People ask me for recipes from my waffle parties, and I'm helpless to provide them. I don't use recipes. My results are, sadly, irreproducible.

Speaking of cooking, tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., and I'll be taking Thursday and Friday off. See you on Monday morning.

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Social Status & Adolescents

Noakes and Rinaldi (2006) studied the different types of conflict experienced by adolescents, and found that boys tended to have conflict over status/dominance, whereas girls tended to have more relational issues. This approach to gender differences in sources of conflict is pervasive in studies of all age groups, but less is known about dominance structures within the female group. Sippola et al (2007) review the dominance structures of teenage girls in the context of the perceived growth in teen-girl violence, in a chapter in Aggression and Adaptation: The Bright Side to Bad Behavior (Hawley et al).

Oldehinkel et al (2007) found that different areas of social status correlated with differential risk of depression, in a fascinating "peer nomination" model. Boys who were not rated as being "good at sports" by their peers had a higher risk of depression, whereas girls who were rated low on "being liked" were more likely to be depressed.

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I'm baffled by this framing issue, and surprised that I was not able to find more studies like Oldehinkel's that use other student's ratings to assess social status. I'm also surprised that there seems to be so little acknowledgement of any "status" structure in the social workings of girls' society. I should clarify my obvious bias on this point: I was painfully aware, all through elementary school and high school, of being the "least popular" student in my classes. Even now, I spend more energy thinking about social status than is strictly healthy.

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Scary Videos - Murphy on Stereotype threat

A post by Patrissimo earlier this month reminded me of a study I hadn't got around to covering. Murphy et al (2007) found a physiological vigilance response in female math, science, and engineering (MSE)* majors who watched a video depicting a conference with a 3:1 male-female ratio. This response was not present in women watching a gender-balanced video or in men watching either video. Murphy also found that both males and females expressed greater desire to attend conferences when the videos showed the gender-balanced video instead of the 3:1 male-female ratio. Blogger Chris at "Mixing Memory" discusses the article at length.

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Well, that will teach me. I hate being late to a party. When Patrissimo posted about this, I was sure I'd already talked about Murphy et al, and then found it wasting away to irrelevance in my drafts folder since October 5th. Oh, the shame. The thing I really like about Mixing Memory's post about Murphy is the distinction that Chris draws between the fields of "psychology" (female dominated) to cognitive psychology (male dominated). Even within fields that are closer to gender balanced, there seems to be a division of focus that mirrors traditional gender splits. Like Chris, I often feel the "sense of helplessness" about how (or whether) to correct this.

* I'm not sure why Murphy uses the abbreviation "MSE." I'm more familiar with people using STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

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Gender and Herpes

Last report from last week's APHA meeting abstracts: Sara Head found that women were more likely to test positive for Herpes Simplex Virus Type II (HSV-2), the virus strain associated with genital herpes. Head also found that African-Americans and those less fearful of HSV-2 were more likely to test positive for HSV-2. In a separate presentation, Head² found that Caucasians were more likely than African-Americans to engage in unprotected oral sex. Head found that 18.6% of participants reported using a condom for oral sex at least once in the past 3 months. Sara Head is a research assistant at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health.

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After spending most of the week on topics which I have little or no personal context for, I thought I'd finish up APHA week with a topic I know all too well. I've been living with HSV-2 since 1996. About half of that time was spent living as a man, and half as a woman, but I haven't noticed a distinct difference in the way I perceive my herpes, or in how other people react to it. Normally, I don't think Tab A and Slot B make that much of a difference in terms of interaction, but when tabs-and-slots are the focus of the interaction, it becomes a bigger deal. Socially, I think of myself as a man; sexually, I'm a FTM, and that affects the risk assessments that my partners and I have to make.

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Culture, Gender, and HIV

APHA week continues: At last week's APHA meeting, many papers reported differences in the way that men and women regard HIV and AIDS, across many cultures. All results are 2007. In India, Agrawal et al reported that men were significantly more likely to hold stigmatizing attitudes than women (OR=1.56). Fumihiko Yokota found that men living with HIV/AIDS in Thailand were more likely to perceive and experience stigma than women living with HIV/AIDS. Men also tended to have more visible symptoms in this study.

In the Western hemisphere, fear of HIV stigma is also a powerful force. Thomas et al that fear of stigma kept both African-American men and women at historically black colleges and universities from getting tested for HIV. "Promiscuity" was seen as being a risk factor for women, and "down low" behavior was seen as risky for men. Dévieux et al found that only 25% of HIV+ pregnant women in Haiti had disclosed their status to partners or family, due to fear of stigma. Rojas et al surveyed Latino university students with a 12-item quiz on prevention, transmission and stigma; they report that "the likelihood of answering stigma questions correctly decreased ... by 68% if the respondent was a female." (I have written the author for clarification of this point).

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Some days, I really feel the draw of public health again. I'm unabashedly soaking in it this week. If this isn't your cup of tea -- well, I promise no more APHA papers next week. (maybe) Anyway, HIV Stigma: I think I was 17 the first time I got tested, but my memories are somewhat fuzzy on this point. Getting tested wasn't the big deal. However, the walk to the clinic to pick up my results is a very vivid memory. There had been a storm the night before, and the trees were covered in a thick coating of ice. I remember the sound of the wind clicking the frozen branches together. It was very beautiful and for fifteen minutes I was terrified. I got tested every few years after that. Since 2002, I've been tested annually. It has finally become routine, but it wasn't automatic.

The results seem to fit the pattern that women are more concerned about social stigma, and less likely to apply it, than men. However, not all of the studies referenced today address this issue, and it's difficult to really assess the relative strength of these results. Only the abstracts of the APHA meeting talks are available online.

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Risk of Physical Violence in High School Dating

Masho and Hamm (2007) analyzed data from the 2005 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey to find the prevalence and risk factors for dating physical violence (DPV) in teens in grades 9 through 12. These results were reported at last week's 2007 American Public Health Association annual meeting. Surprisingly, they found similar response rates to the question: "during the past 12 months, did your boyfriend or girlfriend ever hit, slap, or physically hurt you on purpose."(ScienceDirect): 9.2% for females and 9.0% for males. While several factors appeared as a risk factor for DPV in both boys and girls (sexual activity, physical fighting, sexual victimization, and suicidal thoughts), two factors stood out as sexually differentiated. Masho and Hamm found that poor body image was a predictor of physical victimization for girls, but not for boys. Illicit drug use was a predictor for boys, but not for girls.

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I'm not recalling any time when I've ever had a partner hit, slap, or intentionally physically hurt me. I did slap a boyfriend once in college: hard, across the face, and in anger. He dumped me on the spot, and I probably deserved it. However, I'm fairly certain that his reaction was unusual. I certainly thought he was over-reacting at the time. While I'd like to see female-initiated violence taken that seriously as a general matter of course, I just don't envision that as likely anytime soon. I feel like playful slapping and punching of women is too much a part of the flirting paradigm for any physical outbursts but the most violent to be taken seriously. While I was a woman, my habit of hitting was generally received in good humor. It took serious self-control to learn to stop doing it. Honestly, it wasn't until I transitioned and saw the difference in how my hitting was perceived that I realized how actually appalling my hitting had been.

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Male Sexual Assault

At last week's 2007 American Public Health Association annual meeting, one topic explored was the prevalence of male sexual assault: that is, sexual assault where the victim is male. Masho and Anderson (2007) survey of adult males in Virginia found a lifetime prevalence rate of 12.9% for male sexual assault, with about 60% of the perpetrators being men. Men with a history of assault were more likely to be depressed than those without a history of assault, according to this survey. Choudhary et al (2007), in contrast, found worsened mental health outcomes for women, but not men, following sexual assault. Choudhary's results came from analysis of the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System core and sexual violence modules. Choudhary's abstract gives an lifetime prevalence estimate of 1 in 33 men (3.3%) having been sexually victimized, versus 1 in 6 women.

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Choudhary's victimization numbers seem really low to me. I've heard a lifetime prevalence of assault in the neighborhood of 1 in 4 (25%). I know I'm working with napkin numbers here, but I believe the depression rate in women is roughly twice the rate in men. Call me crazy, but has anyone done a study on depression rates between men and women when controlling for history of sexual assault? Choudhary appears to have come close, but I'm extremely dubious about these findings, which seem to suggest that the only way men react to sexual assault is by smoking more. Since Choudhary's prevalence rate was so much lower, I'm not sure if the same criteria were being used.

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Why Wait?

From Myers et al (2007) - wait times for men
and women on fancy and plain drinks.

Tim Harford (2007) reports for Slate.com that women tend to order "fancy" coffee drinks more often than men. Economist Caitlin Knowles Myers (2007, PDF) sent undergraduate researchers to eight coffee shops in the Boston area, and found that even controlling for drink fanciness, men still got served quicker -- 20 seconds quicker on average. Although Myers acknowledges that there may be degrees of drink fanciness that were not controlled for, she concludes that discrimination is likely be to blame for this difference in service times. This finding is supported by the analysis that women waited even longer when shops were busy and longer when being served by male employees than by female employees.

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We've discussed coffee before, in terms of caffeine-seeking behavior (possibly higher in men) and neuroprotective effects of caffeine (probably higher for women). While looking for additional evidence of women ordering fancier coffee drinks, I tripped over this article from the New York Times (1899) on "the intemperance of women" in regards to caffeinated beverages, which I hope you'll enjoy for some historical perspective.

Thanks to cabanasloth for pointing out Myers (2007).

EDIT: Actually, it occurs to me that this is probably apropos of my Flickr post from yesterday about occasional cravings for convenience store "cappachino."
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Gender Equity Index

Reuters (2007) reported yesterday that Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland continue to top the World Economic Forum's ranking of countries by gender equality. The countries at the bottom of the 128-country list were Yemen, Chad, Pakistan, Nepal, and Saudi Arabia. The Global Gender Gap Report 2007 examines four areas for equality: economic, educational, political, and health. The U.S. fell from 23rd in 2006 to 31st in 2007, losing ground on all measures. The U.S.'s worst score was on the educational attainment measure, at 76th. Canada was ranked 18th in 2007, down from 14th in 2006. Canada lost ground on all measures but their worst: their health gap was 51st in both 2006 and 2007. The top five countries were all assessed to be in the "high income" group, while the bottom five were all in the low-income group, except for Saudi Arabia.

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I feel like I'd prefer to live in a country that landed higher on this ranking, but that's not entirely true. Honestly, as much as I want gender equity, I wonder about overall quality of life. I feel like there's some proverb here, but I can't remember it. Isn't there one about it being better to be a servant in the emperor's palace than king of a swamp? Maybe I'm making that up. Still, even in the high-income countries, Canada and the U.S. didn't rank as high as I'd hope.

(Sort of off-topic: I just heard someone in the outer office express surprise that our receptionist could move the 5 gallon water bottles with the phrase "Not traditionally women's work." I nearly sprayed my coffee. Do people still say that?)

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Frequent Flyers

Is the ratio of men to women travelling by airplane different from that in the general population? Fisher Chia-Yu Chen (2007) had 45.5% male respondents to a questionnaire distributed at an airport in Taiwan. Several air travel papers (e.g. Warburg et al (2006)) cite the results of Resource Systems Groups' SurveyCafe's 2003 results - which note no patterns in airline passenger gender. Northwest Airline's SkyRadio reports that 48% of their passengers are male. Generally speaking, it appears that no, there is no difference.

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Color me shocked! I genuinely expected to find that men made up a disproportionate number of airline passengers. It's actually sort of reassuring. I was also expecting to see well-meaning-yet-deeply-offensive explanations that women weren't flying "because of the children" or "because travel isn't necessary to their jobs." I really expected to be depressed by this topic. On the other hand, I also expected to see more available information on it. Even finding these three feeble references was harder than I expected.

(FYI: Response time may be a bit slower today. I'm catching a 6:00am flight.)
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Let Me Drive

Jaqueline "Jackie" Spears got tired of making other teachers defensive. In teacher in-service classes, she found that the topic made teachers so uncomfortable that they would just shut down, and math and science teachers did not seem to attend at all. "I became interested in finding ways to talk about the issue so that the teachers would open up instead of shut down," she says in a Kansas State Press Release (2007). Spears, with some help from the NSF, created the Seeing Gender: Tools for change (2005) program (available on CD and on the web).

Among the gender difference claims made by Spears is the concept of "short-circuiting". Teachers and girls both contribute to this pattern. Teachers are more likely to "take over" a task when a girl asks for help, but will explain the task to boys. Girls learn to anticipate this: "girls were more likely to take their hands away from the mouse and keyboard in anticipation of a teacher's help whereas boys keep their hands on the equipment" according to the press release. This is a concern voiced by Keri Logan (2007) as well, who suggests that single-sex classrooms may allieviate boys' tendency to dominate computing courses, although she stresses that teacher involvement is more important. Laura Ann Robertson (2006) quotes a physics teacher: "sometimes the girls let the guys take charge", and suggests that single-sex lab groups may help get girls involved.

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The thing that I really like about Spears' work is the emphasis on making teachers aware of their own behavior in the classroom. There are steps that an individual teacher can take to make changes in his or her own classroom. Robertson makes similar suggestions, such as allowing all students more time to answer (it has been suggested that girls don't answer as quickly as boys). The computing class example that Spears offers really spoke to me this morning. I don't instruct students in computing techiniques, but I am often called upon to do so for my coworkers. Whether I take over the computer or not largely depends on whether I think they'll need to do a task unassisted later. If it's a one-time fix, I'm likely to reach over and fix it. I can't think of a specific gender pattern to the way I do this, but I can imagine a similar justification running through the minds of teachers. If they think that girls aren't going to need it, they may be less motivated to help girls understand it. In fact, this is one of the driving ideas behind Robertson's paper -- the idea that teachers may secretly feel that girls don't need physics.

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Drawing from Memory

Last month, we looked at Feng et al's (2007) research that suggested that player first-person shooter video games could improve performance in a mental rotation task - especially in women. Ferguson et al (2007), also published last month, found that men's and women's abilities to draw "masculine" and "feminine" object exemplars seemed to vary depending on how much they played "violent" video games. That is, the ability of women to draw a "revolver" or a "video game controller" varied in relationship to how many hours, since middle school, they had played violent video games. Out of concern that the "video game controller" exemplar would favor gamers, the results from this exemplar were excluded from the final analysis. Video game players still outperformed non-players on the "revolver" and gender-neutral exemplars, as well as on the Rey-Osterreith Complex Figure (ROCF). There were no gender differences on the ROCF performance.

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Wait: I'm going to make a broad, sweeping, and completely unfair generalization again. Ready? Here it comes. I have to question the ability to categorize video games made by someone who puts an AOL address as the contact on their article. AOL? Seriously? I know he's got an university address - I checked on the Texas A&M site, where sociology, psychology, social work, and criminal justice seem to be one big happy academic department. Okay, that was probably several sweeping statements. It got away from me.

But damn. If you're going to use "how good are you at picturing a video game controller?" as your measure of masculine brain function, then I don't even know where to start. I am impressed with the fact that video game playing predicted ability to draw the ROCF after only a minute looking at it. However, I think the point of my greatest concern is the way that the "masculine" and "feminine" exemplar drawings were scored:

Standardized rubrics for scoring the exemplars based upon the presence or absence of six separate components of each exemplar. For example the rubric for the exemplar “bicycle” included “chain that leads to rear wheel,” “identifiable seat”, “frame between seat and rear wheel forms an ‘A’ shape,” “brakes located on handlebars or petals,” “wheels have spokes” and a rating of overall quality for a total possible score of “6.” Score ranges on all exemplars were from zero to six.

Individual detail counting makes sense to me on a bicycle (rated gender-neutral) or a revolver (rated masculine), but I'm not sure how appropriate that is to a "brassiere" or "makeup compact", the items presented as feminine exemplars.

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EDIT: Ferguson's response in comments

Do Men have a Gender?

Social psychologist Peter Hegarty commented on a post from last December on the "male-norm effect." Last year's post discussed Hegarty and Buechel's 2006 content analysis of gender difference psychology articles from 1965-2004, which found that men were reported as the norm. An experiment by Hegarty (2006) suggests this effect can be manipulated, but was unable to distinguish possible gender differences in susceptibility to the experimental manipulation (few partipants were men). Pratto, Korchmaros & Hegarty (2007) found that participants rarely listed race or gender of celebrities when these were career-typical (e.g. mentioning that Dan Rather is male) but did when it was atypical (e.g. Barbara Walters is female) -- even though they were instructed to list ways in which these celebrities were typical of their professions. This effect appeared to be stronger for race than gender.

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Hegarty's research is not so much about gender differences, but rather about the way that society frames gender, race, and sexuality in order to study it. In my own experience, I've actually questioned how much this societal framing influenced my transition. Most of the time, I don't feel particularly gendered at all. In a mythical gynocentric society, would I have defaulted to female?

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Psychiatric History & Arrest Risk

Two articles published yesterday look at the relationship between arrest records and psychiatric problems in young adults. Copeland et al (2007) followed 1,420 adolescents in North Carolina from psychiatric intake at age 9-13 through age 21. Davis et al (2007) followed 1,519 teens in Massachusetts DMH care from age 15-20 through age 25.

Both studies found high arrest rates in these cohorts. Davis found that 69% of the males and 46% of the females in her group were arrested at least once by age 25. Copeland found 42.8% of males vs. 19.6% of females were arrested, but only tracked through age 21. Davis reported that there was no gender difference in risk of first arrest by age 18. Copeland found that the type of crime varied significantly by gender, with males being far more likely to be involved in a violent crime vs. a property or drug crime, which made up the vast majority of female arrests. Davis' results also found that the crimes males were arrested for tended to be more severe. The women in Davis' sample were more likely to have multiple arrests.

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I have never been arrested, or even detained. I am, and always have been, extremely avoidant of conflict, and pretty much terrified of police. My risk-taking behaviors have been pretty restrained. For most of my life, this was simply a fear of the amorphous concept of "getting in trouble", and the specific fear of people being angry with me. Hell, I'm still not good at dealing with the latter. However, for the past five years, I've had a very deep seated fear of arrest which has actually stopped me from doing things I might otherwise have done, like go to demonstrations where I think police response is likely. Basically, the criminal justice system has not inspired me with any confidence as to their ability to handle transsexuals safely, and the risk level is unacceptable to me. Sometimes it bothers me how frightened I am of this. Mostly, I think I'm being entirely reasonable.

Similarly, I've always been afraid to seek psychiatric help, because I haven't been impressed with those institutions either. Granted, I haven't felt like I've needed it in several years; probably not since I transitioned, now that I think about it. Maybe I just have a deep-seated distrust of institutional care. Again, I think that's reasonable.

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You wouldn't like me when I'm angry

Iris Mauss wants to see you get angry. Mauss is the lead researcher at the Emotion Regulation Lab at the University of Denver. Mauss et al (2006) (including Evers) tested automatic, implicit emotional control against deliberate emotional control in 42 female college students. They found that deliberate emotional control actually made anger expression and self-report worse, while automatic, implicit control lessened all anger measures. However, it is not clear that the level of anger aroused was equivalent in both groups. It may be that people who experience less anger in general are more likely to have positive implicit beliefs about emotional control. In a more recent refinement of the experiment, Mauss et al (2007) again used women only: "because anger-related emotion regulatory goals appear to apply with particular force to women (anger expression is seen as more inappropriate for women than for men... and to eliminate variance due to gender differences." Again, Mauss found that implicit, unconscious regulation of emotion was less "costly" than conscious control. More interestingly, Mauss found that she could prime subjects for implicit control by having them do word jumbles for stimuli like "restrains" and "stable."

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My first reaction when looking at Mauss' webpage was that she doesn't like working with men as subjects or as colleagues. The only men in her lab are undergraduate researchers. Now, that's not the only unfair statement I've made this week, *shame* but it's probably the worst. Many of her listed collaborators are men, by the way. I was surprised that it seems almost impossible to find comparable research on men's emotional control. Mauss cites Timmers et al (1998) for the idea that men are less motivated to control their anger, because anger "reflects their power." My personal experience that anger is a reflection of my powerlessness would probably be attributed to my upbringing as female.

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