The Gender Differences Of Stress Responses

Stress will trigger people’s responses from the aspects of emotion, cognition and behavior. For a very long time,"fight or flight" had been considered as the most typical response to stress. Most of the previous experiments are on male subjectes, female subjects were of seldom chosen for this kind of studies. What is more, male and female responses to stress had been considered the same; there was no difference between genders. With the development of researches, some psychologists found this theory cannot explain some responses of women under pressure conditions. Shelley Taylor, basing on her a series of studies, pointed out that there was gender differences of stress responses. From the point of evolutionary psychology, women’s parental investment is higher than men’s, so in order to guarantee the survival and growth of their offspring, women evolved another alternative response, tend and befriend.As we all know, Making decision is a kind of inherent behavior which belongs to human. There are many situation of making decisions that we must face in our life. And a large number of decisions are made under pressure. Thus, the gender differences of stress responses should exist in decision-making behaviors. The research verified the gender differences of stress responses from the aspect of decision-making behavior.Decision-making is a kind of process which people choose a program from several alternative programs to solve’a problem. Risk decision is be able to measure individuals’risk propensity. The response of "fight or flight" could be seen as a risk behavior, so the experiment1probed the gender differences of the risk propensity under pressure, by the study on risk decision behaviors of men and women.The game is the decision situation which refers to more than one decision subjects. The ultimatum game could be used to assess the individuals’cooperation tendency. The response of "tend and befriend" could be seen as a kind of cooperative behavior, so the experiment2probed the gender differences of the cooperation tendency under pressure, by the study on the cooperative game behaviors of men and women.The subjects of these two experiments were junior students. The conclusions of this study are stated as below:(1) The gender difference of risk tendency under pressure was significant. Men tended to seek adventure, while women tended to avoid adventure. (2) Compared with no pressure condition, under the pressure condition there was a significant increase on men’s risk tendency; while women’s risk tendency reduced significantly.(3) The gender difference of cooperative tendency under pressure was significant. Compared with men, more women tended to cooperate.(4) Compared with no pressure condition, under the pressure condition there was a significant increase on women’s cooperative tendency; while men’s cooperative tendency did not apparently change.(5) Examination stress could trigger male and female students’ stress anxiety.