Women anticipate negative experiences differently to men

Men and women differ in the way they anticipate an unpleasant emotional experience, which influences the effectiveness with which that experience is committed to memory, according to new research.

In the study, supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, women showed heightened neural responses in anticipation of negative experiences, but not positive ones. The neural response during anticipation was related to the success of remembering that event in the future. No neural signature was found during anticipation in either positive or negative experiences in men.

Dr Giulia Galli, lead author from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience said: ''When expecting a negative experience, women might have a higher emotional responsiveness than men, indicated by their brain activity. This is likely to then affect how they remember the negative event.''

''For example, when watching disturbing scenes in films there are often cues before anything 'bad' happens, such as emotive music. This research suggests that the brain activity in women between the cue and the disturbing scene influences how that scene will be remembered. What matters for memory in men instead is mostly the brain activity while watching the scene.

''This finding might be relevant for psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, in which there is excessive anticipation of future threat and memory is often biased towards negative experiences.''

In an experiment researchers showed a series of images to 15 women and 15 men. Before the image was revealed the participants were shown a symbol that indicated what kind of image they were about to see; a smiley face for a positive image, a neutral face for a non-emotive image and a sad face for a negative image.