The Difference In Sensitivity Of The Valence Intensity Between Feminine And Masculine Women Under Anger-inducing

World Health Organization(WHO) research indicates that the incidence rate of severe depression in female is about20%-26%in all life, but in male is only8%-12%.A growing body of studies has revealed that for different cultures and ethnic groups, a higher prevalence of affective disturbances such as depression, anxiety disorder, and phobia in females than in males (Altemus,2006; Nolen-Hoeksema&Girgus,1990; Scheibe, Preuschhof, Cristi,&Bagby,2003; Simon&Nath,2004).Compared with males, females are more capable of labeling negative affects and show more accurate in recognizing and memorizing emotional stimuli, which has important physiological basis that the same emotionally negative pictures activated more neural substrates as well as greater cerebral activation values (e.g. inamygdala) in females relative to males (Wrase et al.,2003; Hofer et al.,2006; Orozco and Ehlers,1998). Emotional negativity bias that emotionally negative stimuli, due to their important adaptive values, are processed preferentially throughout the information processing stream has been well established (Ito et al.,1998; Delplanque et al.,2004; Huang and Luo,2006; Yuan et al.,2007a,b), this phenomenon finds in both males and females. Males, similar to females, are sensitive to emotionally negative events with high valence intensity as predicted by emotional negativity bias, whereas males may be less sensitive to negative stimuli of less valence intensity relative to females, which may be an important mechanism underlying the female advantage in identifying negative emotions(Li&Yuan et al.,2008).Under the same appearance of emotional sitimuli, compared with males, females subjectively feel more negative stimuli(Yuan&li,et al.,2009). Females show enhanced sensitivity to rare stimulus that is neutral, even irrelevant to emotion(Yuan&Li,2010).Females have the tendency to self-attribution, they always adopt rumination and attention focus to cope with passive life events. For example, when males find their friends are not passionate,they may think that it is their friends’ problem. On the contrary, when facing with the same condition, females tends to think its themseleves problem, such as it is maybe females themseleves’something cause friends’ dislike. Females’rumination and self-attribution dealing with passive events might lead to females’higher prevalence of depression(Mak, Hu, Zhang, Xiao,&Leea,2009). Recently, researchers start to focus and explore the relationship between anger experience and females’ higher prevalence of depression. There is a widespread belief that anger is experienced and expressed more frequently by males than females. Some scholars have suggested that the greater prevalence of depression among women is due to their tendency to turn anger inward rather than outward as do men (Frankel1991, Tavris1982, Weissman&Paykel1974). While Simon and Lively (2010) analysized sociological data and found that intense and persistent subjectively experienced anger is more common among females than males. Furthermore, they suggest that females’ intense and persistent anger play a pivotal role in their high rate of depression. Sex-role is a part of acquired social gender, sex role not only plays an important role in the development of individuals, but also influences the evolution of national characteristics (Liudianzhi et al.,2011). Gender is the degree of andrpphany and feminization. Feminine women are that women have more woman traits and less man traits, while masculine women are that women have more man traits and less woman traits. Kopper and Epperson’s (1996) research finds that compared with masculine individuals, feminine individuals tend to suppress anger expression and have more depression symptoms, and think that there is a positive relationship between feminine individuals’depress anger.On the basis of all, we hypothesize that:1) compared with masculine women, feminine women have the tendency to suppress anger;2) under anger emotion, feminine women subjectively feel more anger and physical arousal;3) under anger emotion, feminine women are more sensitive to negative stimuli of valence intensity. The research try to explore this question with three experiments. Research1:According to questionannaire survey, we elected feminine and masculine women, thus measured their anger expression ways and anxiety and depression, which can explore the anger and depression in feminine and masculine women; Research2:The feminine women and masculine women were selected with Chinese Sex-Role Inventory (CSRI-50). Both groups then were elicited anger by watching two anger-inducing film clips in a laboratory environment and their emotional response in modalities of subjective experience and physiological responses were recorded using questionnaires and Biotrace software to investigate the differences of anger experience between feminine and masculine women. Research3:The feminine women and masculine women were elicited anger by watching two anger-inducing film clips in a laboratory environment. The study investigated whether female women are more sensitive to valence differences in emotionally negative stimuli by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) for extremely negative (EN), moderately negative (MN), and neutral pictures while subjects perform a standard/deviant categorization task. The results are as following:(1) Research1found that feminine women’s anger-in scores were higher than masculine women, but anger control-in Scores were much lower than masculine women. Feminine women’s anxiety and depression scores were higher than masculine women.The depression were positively correlated with anger-in, but negatively correlated with anger control-in.(2)Research2found that comparing to masculine, feminine women’s respiration rate (RSP rate) increased more, but Skin conductance (SC) increased less in the post film period; moreover, feminine women reported more anger experience and more depressive feelings.(3)Research3found that under anger-inducing, feminine women’s reaction time of less negative stimuli is shorter than neutral stimuli.Under anger-inducing compared with masculine women, feminine women are more sensitive to emotionally negative events, and females were more sensitive to negative stimuli of less valence intensity relative to males, which feminine women elicited more negative deflections in the early P2(140-200ms), N2(230-290ms), and later P3(350-450ms). In summary, three researches explore the relationship between gender, anger and depression, which provide evidence to the reason of a higher prevalence of depression in females from different point of view.