The Memories of Men and Women

The Memories of Men and Women

Introduction

Studies that have been carried out by psychologists have found that women have relatively better memories compared to men for a number of events, such as the ones involving emotions. It is important to note that experiences which prove to be emotionally arousing in any manner for women tend to be more memorable for them compared to experiences that are neutral (Canli et. al, 2002). It has been noticed in the studies that due to their behavioral patterns, women are more likely to rate a higher number of pictures as highly negative and also tend to remember better the pictures which are rated by men and women to be highly negative. The psychological differences that exist in men and women go together with complicated combination of activations, which are distinct and sometimes common in both the sexes, and are correlated with different measures of emotional evaluation and encoding of memory. A substantial difference in sec can be seen in relations that exist between neural systems. Women usually have more areas compared to men that can be activated by emotional experiences that are subjection (Canli et. al, 2002). Apart from that, successful encoding of experiences into the long-term memory also causes those areas to be activated. As a result, these processes which involve encoding and evaluation are able to become the mechanism through which women are able to attain and sustain an emotional memory that is better than that of men.

Even though the connections between education and sex and cognitive function have been studied before, study of the empirical data helps provide useful insight that these factors contribute to a major extent in deciding how well the memory function performs as people age. The usage of empirical data can help in determining the normal levels for an individual's memory function, and also helps in highlighting whether the memory function is appropriate according to the age, gender and educational level of the person. A lot of scientific literature has given proof that women usually outperform men when verbal function is tested, whereas men are more prone to outperform their women counterparts when jobs of spatial function are considered (Canli et. al, 2002).

Relation between Future Memories and Current Experiences

It has been demonstrated that women usually have more regions of brain compared to men that have greater activation levels correlated with intensity ratings of emotions. Apart from that, they also have higher activation levels for brain regions that correlate with a better memory in terms of recognizing pictures or visuals that are emotionally intense. These areas are referred to as being concordant while processing emotional intensity of the present time and in driving processes of encoding that outline what type of experiences are recalled later. The areas which are related to concordant processing involve different types of structures that were identified in the past in studies of imaging to be linked with encoding of memory. They are also linked with emotional experience that is conscious, ...