I've been ignoring the blog for some months while I tried to complete my site redesign. However, during that time I still collected items that I would normally note in my blog. So for the next wee while, I'm going to tell you about some of these, topic by topic. Today, because these items have some relevance to my latest newsletter, I want to mention a few items I gathered on gender differences.
The most recent of these is a fascinating study that looked at both 3-6 year olds and adults, and found that females, regardless of age group, were more likely to believe that:

• people are motivated by fears of what might happen
• people would worry that a person similar to one that had harmed them in the past would cause them harm
• negative past events forecast negative future events

This tendency, the researchers suggest, may explain why women tend to be greater worriers, more anxious, and have less tolerance for risk and uncertainty.

The second study I wish to mention is a medical study that found sleep deprivation had a greater effect on women than men -- specifically, in increasing the risk of hypertension, which in turn increases the risk of cardiovascular problems. This is relevant here for two reasons: because sleep deprivation impairs cognition, and this raises the possibility that it may be worse for women than men, and because cardiovascular problems are implicated in age-related cognitive decline and dementia.

The final study is quite different. This is a study that found (as is entirely consistent with well-established gender differences in spatial ability) that men were better than women at spotting unusual objects in their field of vision. But, and this is the interesting bit, after spending ten hours (presumably not all at once!) playing a shoot-'em-up video game, women improved their ability so much they were equal in performance to the men. Moreover, when the test was run again five months later, the improvement was still there. This finding confirms an earlier monkey study showing simple spatial-memory training did not help males but dramatically helped females, raising their performance to the level of young-adult males and wiping out the gender gap.