Gender differences

I don't really understand why I need to study the difference between genders in Psychology. However, I find it is an interesting topic to be discussed together with friends during tea time.

People are being oversensitive with the term 'sex'. When we all come across with the term 'sex', what we will first think of will usually be sexual intercourse, intimate relationship with opposite-sex, beware of using condom and make some precautions before having sex. I apologise if I am being a bit 'open-minded' when talking about this topic.

Indeed, I did learn about functional and physiological differences between men and women in the lectures. Even in the lecture of 'sleep', the lecturer told us: during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, male will have erection and female will secrete vaginal fluid. I felt ashamed and I could feel my face was a bit flushed when the lecturer gave a lecture regarding 'orgasm' and 'foreplay'. Fortunately, this only occupied one lecture slot, not the rest of my second semester. I felt uneased when the lecturer told us: when I am giving you this kind of lecture, you will definitely inhibit your brain from imagining those kind of pictures.' I wanted to say: Oh gosh, I would appreciate if you ended this lecture earlier, though I liked your lecturer's way of delivering lecture very much.

I think most of you have heard of men are being more masculinised while women are more feminine. Boys like to play with cars and girls like to play with dolls. Psychologists are still searching for the best explanation for this 'biological predisposition' on play preference. Is this due to the environmental effect? Because boys are more socially acceptable of playing with cars but not dolls. Or is this difference due to the testosterone level? Boys like to play with cars because they are biologically predisposed?

Evidence showed that men are better in visual skills whereas women are better in verbal tasks. Most of us know that left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for verbal ability. On the other hand, right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for spatial ability. If lateralisation of the brain is important in explaining this sex difference, then women who are left-handed will have more advanced spatial ability and men who are left-handed will perform better on spatial ability than those who are right-handed. However, finding supported the former but not the latter argument. left-handed women perform well on visual tasks but not men. In contrast, they perform worse than the right-handed men.

I was surprised when being told about this: when people have higher sex hormones, they will feel better and have good mood. For women, the level of estrogen, a female hormone, is high during luteal phase but low during premenstrual phase in menstrual cycle. Since sex hormones can affect our mood, now, we can understand why women are acting more aggressively and having a bad mood before they have period, more commonly, being known as premenstrual syndrome (PMS). This also happens in men. However, since men do not have menstruation, they do not have what we call PMS but mood swings.

Do you think that sex hormone affects your performance or your mood? Evidence showed that women had better motor performance when their estradiol (estrogen) level was high. Is sex hormone a direct or indirect influence on our performance? No one can give you a definite answer yet. There are far too many studies being carried out and a variety of evidences has been found. Some argue that sex hormone is a determinant factor while some disagree with this claim.

Interesting or not? This is just a small part of what I have to study in a module. If I give this answer to my lecturer in the final exam, he will definitely ...