Research On Gender Differences In The Perception Of Romance In College Students

Romantic love is a special human experience, and it is one of the most beautiful human feelings. It affects many aspects of our life, and love is closely related to relationship satisfaction, marriage quality. Having a good love experience is a major blessing. It affects people’s behavior and psychology to some extent. If the men and women in love are able to understand each other, and they can feel each other’s feelings, then the love will be sweet and harmony. If they are not able to understand their partner’s psychology and behavior, love will also cast a layer of haze, and even lead to the break and crime. Obviously, harmonious relationship of love affair is very important to both our life and social. But, in reality, we often hear women complain that their partners are not romantic. However, men always feel puzzled. They have done so many things they can do to please their girlfriends, why she was still not satisfied? What causes the inconsistent? So, the view of the romantic between men and women is really different?After the World War Ⅱ, sociologists have compiled the Romantic Beliefs Scale, a-questionnaire including some romantic index. It can measure the romantic attitude of male and female students. The result showed that the scores of men were generally higher than that of female. It seems that men are more romantic. The measurement of the romantic is mainly about the romantic attitude rather than romantic feelings. Some American and British psychological researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the romantic love. They asked subjects to look at the photos of lovers and ordinary friends alternately. When subjects looked at the photos of one’s beloved, rewarding and motivation systems of brain activate much greater than looking at friends’photos. These studies about the romantic brain mechanism only concern on emotion. They did not care about cognitive components. No further research on gender differences was conducted. However, there are differences in activation patterns of brain regions in the processing of men and women processing information. And we think that love includes not only the mood, but also the cognitive component.This study attempts to explore the cognitive factors and differences between male and female of romantic love. My experiment mainly explored whether there are differences between the male and female students and how about the brain mechanism of romantic perception. In order to explore gender differences we conducted a preliminary experiment and two formal experiments.In the preliminary experiment, we classified the items of the questionnaire, to test the reliability and validity of questionnaire.60text items of project romantic perception was selected as the experimental material.In Experiment1, there are a behavioral experiment and a magnetic scan experiment. In behavior experiment, we use the self-designed questionnaire to estimate132college students’love state and test if there are some gender differences. The results found that there are significant gender differences in the perception among college students. For low romantic events, boys perceived more romantic. And for romance, in high and middle degree, there is no significant difference. There is no gender difference between their states of love. To further explore the brain mechanism of the gender differences we conducted magnetic scanning experiments. We recruited30in love, including18boys and12girls, and let them evaluate60text topics’romantic degree. And at this time we scanned their brain with MRI. Results showed that compared with females, males activated more cognitive areas when they completed the judgment task, such as frontal cortex and precuneus. Compared with males, females did not show stronger brain areas activation. We may conclude that men and women may have different processes of romance.In Experiment2, there are also a behavioral experiment and a magnetic scan experiment. In Experiment2, we used the picture materials to further study this gender difference. Finally we gained60romantic scene pictures by collecting and evaluating the familiar of the romantic pictures, frequency of occurrence and pleasure on the images. Our E-prime program contains these pictures. We recruited102college students who are in love (men and women each52) to conduct behavioral experiments. The result showed that there were no significant gender differences either when they evaluated the higher romantic pictures or when they evaluated the lower romantic pictures. Secondly, we used magnetic scanning experiments to further investigate whether there were different brain reaction regions or not. We recruited36subjects (18couples) in love. Let the subjects evaluated60love scene pictures, and scanned the brain. The result was that compared with females, males activated more emotional area, reward area and social cognition area, such as posterior cingulated, right insula, right caudate, medial superior frontal and anterior cingulated. There was not strong regional activation among the women, compared with males.Based on the above studies, we can come to the following three conclusions:(1) Males and females have gender differences in the perception of romance when using sentences as the material, and males rate higher than do females. There isn’t gender difference when using pictures. These suggest different materials influence the gender differences in the evaluation of romantic degree.(2) Whether we use words or images, males show more brain regions activated than females. These regions mainly associate with social cognition, emotion and reward. It indicates that males need to apply more brain region to process romance than do females and these romantic scenes stimulate their stronger emotional response.(3) The brain regions positively correlated with males’ romance rating mainly associate with social cognition and females’romance scores are significantly related to the brain regions involved in reward and emotion system. These results are suggestive of gender differences in strategies utilized in romance evaluation. Generally speaking, males and females have large difference on romantic love.