Men's Brains are From Mars . . .

Turhan Canli, a recent addition to Psychology, and colleagues elsewhere received international press coverage for findings based on functional MRI data indicating that women have a superior memory for images with a high emotional content. Previous studies had found better memory in women for emotional events, but this was the first to suggest the neural basis of the phenomenon. The MRI results provided visual evidence that men and women activate different neural circuits to encode stimuli effectively into memory, even when shown pictures that were rated equally arousing by both groups. Men and women showed different patterns of activation of brain structures, and women had significantly more brain regions where activation correlated with both ongoing evaluation of emotional experience and subsequent memory for the most emotionally arousing pictures. The report was published in the August 6, 2002 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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