STOP PRESS: Men and women are different!

We live in confusing times. So much so, that sometimes we lose track of the obvious. New research from the University of Basel is reassuringly supportive of something we women instinctively know to be true - that women experience a more potent response to emotional stimuli than men.

This large scale study, the results of which will be published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, set about establishing the gender-dependent relationship between emotions, brain activity and memory performance.

While it is generally known that women consider emotional events to be more impactful than men, research supporting this and linking it to gender-based recall has been relatively thin on the ground.

Almost 3,400 male and female subjects were asked to rate emotionally charged content, some positive and some negative, for the size of the emotional reaction they evoked.

Women rated the content (especially the negative) as being more emotionally impacting than their male counterparts and, in a subsequent memory test, women could freely recall more of the images than men. Women demonstrated particular facility with recalling positive images.

Dr. Annette Milnik, leader of the team from the University of Basel's Molecular and Cognitive Neurosciences Transfaculty Research Platform noted:

"This would suggest that gender-dependent differences in emotional processing and memory [i.e. the difference between men and women when it comes to emotional processing and memory], are due to different mechanisms."

To further probe the findings, MRI data from almost 700 of the subjects showed that womens' stronger reaction to negative emotional content is linked to increased activity in the motor regions of the brain, supporting the common observation that women are more emotionally expressive than men.

Now, I don't know about you, but I would have been surprised by any other result. Logic tells me that women have babies and, biologically, that makes a difference. As the bearers of children we are fundamentally programmed for nurture, which, of course, has a profound effect on both our biology and our psychology. How could it be otherwise?

That's not to say that men are not moved by emotional stimuli; nor to say that some male individuals do not emote in the same way that women do (or some women do!). It is simply to say that, as a general rule, emotional processing and memory of emotional content occur differently for women and men.

Do you have any thoughts on this topic? If so, we'd love to hear from you, men and women alike!

Written by Jacqui Hogan

How's your memory?

That's the question General Practitioners will increasingly be asking patients over fifty, only now it will take on a whole new meaning. This is in line with the news that GPs will now be rewarded £55 for each successful dementia diagnosis.

Dementia is being underdiagnosed, according to health authorities, who claim that only half the 800,000 people in the UK estimated to have dementia have been formally diagnosed.

Assuming this figure is correct, the problem still remains that there is no consensus around what dementia actually is and how it differs, in the early stages, from natural, age-related memory loss (which we've previously talked about here).

There is no screening test to accurately predict it and no-one can tell, even if it is dementia, what course it will take. Among the questions which might be asked are: how fast will it progress?  how much will my life be affected? will I die from it? These are perfectly reasonable questions, questions for which we have no answers. On top of this, there is currently no effective intervention.

So, there you have it. A disease which cannot be effectively defined, for which there is no screening test and no effective treatment - sounds like the perfect candidate for a £5m government 'payment for diagnosis' scheme, right?

Those who oppose the move, like the Patients Association, have described it as imposing a bounty on the heads of some patients and can see no good reason for the initiative - especially when there is already a £42m scheme in England offering GP practices payment for performing assessments on those who present with memory problems. Why the clamour to nail diagnoses, they naturally wonder?

Katherine Murphy, Chief Executive of the Patients Association says the proposed new scheme is "a distortion of good medical practice".

Professor Sir Simon Wessely, President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the scheme would not be effective without investment in social care and further research to assist in our understanding of dementia. He maintains:

"At the moment, evidence favours either improving social care or investing in research to find new treatments that actually nullify the course of the disease. Until that happens, I can see little point in this initiative."

But the government, it seems, is in no mood for debate on the subject. My advice, then, is to make sure that you and your loved ones are well schooled up on details like the date, prime minister's name and other such trivia before your next trip to the local GP. Because even if you do have early onset dementia by whatever spurious screening criteria are adopted, what's the benefit of knowing about it when there is no effective treatment?

And with a diagnosis will come the risk of being labelled 'incompetent', which means you may be putty in the hands of the system - such a label has serious legal implications. Call me a nay-sayer, call me a denier, but in this fast-emerging brave new world, I'd simply prefer not to know.

Written by Jacqui Hogan

FAB memories

Fading Affect Bias (FAB) is a term which applies to the way we remember autobiographical events, with positive affect being shown to persist for longer than negative. You can understand why this might be the case - by holding onto the rose-tinted view we may, arguably, be protecting our mental health and allowing ourselves to adapt and move on.

A new study published in the journal Memory sought to understand whether the FAB principle applies universally, given that past research has focused only on American college students.

The authors tested for evidence of FAB by sampling over 2400 autobiographical event descriptions from 562 participants in ten countries around the world. Participants ranged from mature-age German citizens to Ghanaian students and all were asked to recall a number of positive and negative events in their lives. For each event, they were asked to rate the emotions they felt, both at the time, and in the present when calling the event to mind.

The findings were consistent - each of the ten diverse groups experienced FAB, with negative emotions  associated with remembered events fading more quickly than positive emotions. Furthermore, there was no evidence that FAB changes with increasing age - our bias towards remembering the positive seems to be a lifelong effect. The authors conclude:

"We believe that this phenomenon is part of a set of cognitive processes that foster emotion regulation and enable psychological resilience."

This makes sense to me, but makes me wonder how FAB fits in with the concept of denial, used so frequently as a psychological defence mechanism? Perhaps those fortunate ones who pass through life without mental health issues harness this principle in order to remain mentally well? Perhaps for those with deeper psychological problems, knowing about the existence of FAB may be helpful in breaking through the denial which can mask the truth of a past situation?

What are your experiences with memory? Do you see this phenomenon at work? We'd love to hear your thoughts, so do comment below.

Written by Jacqui Hogan