Aggression A car swerves dangerously in traffic, cutting off Pauline Barker, 48, of Winnipeg, and Peter, her husband. Pauline gasps and hangs on for dear life while Peter explodes, yelling expletives and shaking his fist at the departing maniac. "When he’s driving, he has zero patience for bad drivers," says Pauline with a laugh. "I might get scared, but otherwise, I don’t get upset about them."
Why the difference? "Threatening situations evoke primal feelings," which manifest differently in the two sexes, explains Tara Perrot-Sinal, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Men react with aggression because their hormones take a short, direct pathway through their brains. Women, on the other hand, respond with fear and feelings about protection. They feel anger as much as men do, says Brizendine, but their hostility goes through a weighing-up process aimed at self-preservation: anger in women can be better moderated because women’s brains don’t react to stress in the same way that men’s do.
Stress It’s 3 a.m. and Lisa Robins, 36, a mother of two, is lying awake, the victim of too-much-to-doism and a great deal of stress. Dean, her husband, is snoring gently beside her. Although the couple work together at a small family business in Ottawa and share anxieties, they don’t share the same methods of dealing with them.
"How do I deal with stress? I talk to my friends and I have sleep disorders," says Lisa. "Dean will call a company and yell at them over an extra $3 charge on a bill. He vents, then he feels better."
Completely different reactions – but also fairly typical, says Perrot-Sinal. When a man is stressed, his heart rate and blood pressure skyrocket, and he reacts with a stronger fight-or-flight response. "Men have a higher physiological stress response than women," she says, "but they bottle it up and suffer more from atherosclerosis, hypertension and coronary disease."
Except for the high-hormone phase after menstruation when women are notably calmer than men, we feel pretty much the same amount of stress. But rather than lashing out, we tend and befriend – become protective or talk through issues with friends. The oxytocin we release as a result also keeps us in good health; a University of North Carolina study has found that the bonding hormone lowers women’s blood pressure and stress hormones.
