Women who suppress their emotions are as good at mental rotation as men

By Christian Jarrett In the ongoing, complex debates about the extent and meaning of psychological differences between the sexes, mental rotation ability is usually quoted as one of the most robust examples of where a difference can be found. This is the ability to rotate objects in your mind’s eye, and while there is a lot of overlap between men’s and women’s performance, there is plenty of evidence that men, on average, are better at this than women. Can we take this to reflect a genuine, specific difference in average cognitive ability between the sexes? Not necessarily. A new, small study in Psychological Research reminds us why this field of science is so difficult to interpret. The findings suggest that the mental rotation ability of women who habitually suppress the public display of their emotions is equal to that of men. In other words, sex differences in mental rotation ability may reflect an emotional difference between the sexes – emotional suppression is known to be more common in men than women – rather than a cognitive difference. Anne-Katharina Faltung and Markus Kiefer asked 28 men and 28 women to fill out some surveys about their emotional lives, including their proneness to angry outbursts and their tendency to suppress public displays of emotion (one example item was “I keep my emotions to myself”). Shepard & Meltzer, 1971. Then the participants completed 48 trials of a classic mental rotation task, which involv...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Emotion Gender Source Type: blogs