Attention women of the world: according to a flood of recent news headlines (78 at last count), it’s time to stop watching the news because negative news stories stress you out more than they do men.
These headlines were prompted by a study published last week in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE. The study claimed that after reading negative news stories, women were more reactive to stress and more likely to remember than men.
What a fascinating notion. There I was thinking my ability to remember negative news stories was in some way attributable to my excellent memory, but it turns out it’s just because I’m a woman.
Or is it?
Before you reach for the remote control, it’s worth taking a detailed look at the study.
The study
Conducted by Canadian researchers Marie-France Marin and her colleagues, the study comprised 28 men and 28 women (perhaps this small sample size should have rung alarm bells!). Half were given 12 neutral news stories to read, while the other half read 12 negative news stories.
Participants were then exposed to a test that’s designed to measure psychological stress. The test involved completing a mock job interview speech and doing some mental arithmetic. Saliva samples were collected at ten-minute intervals throughout the study to measure a hormone called cortisol, which is released in response to stress.
The next day, participants were telephoned and asked to recall the news items they had read the day before.
What they found
A closer look at the design of the study and its results suggests that it may be a bit early for women to turn off the news.
First, there was absolutely no evidence that reading bad news led to immediate increases in stress responses for either sex. Rather, it appears that after the stress test, those women who had read the negative news had significantly higher average stress responses than those women who read the neutral news.
This finding suggests that reading negative news leads to an increased stress response to future stressors. Men’s average stress responses were also higher to negative news than neutral news, but the difference between men’s averages was not statistically significant.
And the data provided no suggestion that the emotional valence of the news items affected stress responses differently in men and women. In order for the researchers to make such a claim, it would’ve been necessary to observe a statistical interaction between the emotion inspired by the news items and the sex of the participants. But this was not observed. And men had consistently higher stress responses than women throughout the study, regardless of the news content.
The second finding of interest is that, on average, women recalled significantly more negative news items than men.
This effect should be interpreted very cautiously. Individuals differ in their memory performance and the study didn’t include a baseline measure of this. Nor did it control for a whole host of factors that can influence memory performance, such as age, mood and attention.
These individual differences are particularly likely to result in inaccurate conclusions when dealing with such small sample sizes.
What should we conclude?
So we should be really cautious about giving too much credence to the suggestion that women remember more negative news events than men. At least until such findings are replicated with a larger sample size using a more tightly controlled research design.
And if they are replicated, it’s important to keep in mind what this would actually mean. From the news headlines, you’d be forgiven for thinking that bad news stresses all women out, more than all men. But this is not the case.
Observed sex differences mean that the average score for women is significantly different, statistically speaking, to the average score for men. In the case of mental differences in particular, we typically find that variability in scores between individuals of the same sex are far greater than any difference observed between the average scores of men and women.
The factors that influence what we remember and how the news affects us are complex and varied. I suspect they have a great deal more to do with our capacity to empathise with their content and remember them than what sex chromosomes we’re carrying.
Mike Swinbourne
logged in via Facebook
Megan
I assume you have expressed your criticisms by way of letter to the journal in question.
The sample size does appear to be too small to draw any statistically significant conclusions, but I am certainly no expert of statistics so my views wouldn't carry much weight in that regard. But I would also have to question why - if the study is as flawed as you state - that it passed peer review.
This issue seems to say more about the journal in question, and about the inability of the media to properly report on science issues. I had actually heard about this study a few days ago on the ABC PM program. Perhaps the ABC also needs lessons on how to report science.
Megan Willis
Lecturer, School of Psychology at Australian Catholic University
Hi Mike,
I think the volume of headlines this paper has fostered and the nature of the extreme claims in many of these news headlines is what is of most concern here. It should illustrate the importance of reading more than just an article's title and associated press release. Sometimes a closer inspection suggests the results aren't nearly as convincing as the title would lead you to believe!
Megan
Mike Swinbourne
logged in via Facebook
No argument from me on that issue.
I always try to track down the original paper whenever I read a science article in a newspaper or on a blog. And most of the time, the paper's conclusions are misreported - either by exaggerating a small aspect or just getting it completely wrong.
But unfortunately, the vast majority of people rely on the newspaper report - and as a consequence they get a distorted view of what is really the case.
Sam Loy
logged in via Facebook
Good piece.
However, this quote: "There I was thinking my ability to remember negative news stories was in some way attributable to my excellent memory, but it turns out it’s just because I’m a woman." seems to needlessly accues the researchers of having a biological determinist viewpoint, when there is no evidence of this.
Just because research says that women are more likely to do this thing or that thing than are men, doesn't mean that the sole reason they do that thing is because they are a woman. There may be any number of reasons.
Reema Rattan
Editor at The Conversation
Hi Sam,
The researchers did suggest that biology was what was determining the difference in memory and stress reactivity. You can see that in the title of the study - There Is No News Like Bad News: Women Are More Remembering and Stress Reactive after Reading Real Negative News than Men.
Surely, women are more xyz than men does that.
Sam Loy
logged in via Facebook
Fair enough. I should probably read the Abstract next time.
It's a shame then, that the researchers would place a biological explanation on the differences they observed, when environmental causes could also be the determining factor. If we make the (big) assumption that these results would be replicated in a much larger sample size, it would seem to me to be much more interesting that they are the result of socialisation and not biology.
THat being said, I don't think there is anything essential wrong about reporting findings indicate that biology is a factor in observed sex differences. It is how we use this evidence that produces the problem.
Reema Rattan
Editor at The Conversation
I get the feeling that observed sex differences are generally overstated in psychology and social research generally. Researchers test for differences and only report when they find them. So all those instances where no difference was found are no reported, but when they are found, it's published and publicised (a this study was). It feeds into news reports and gives the impression that there are more differences between men and women than there actually are. This builds a skewed picture, as you can imagine.
Megan Willis
Lecturer, School of Psychology at Australian Catholic University
Hi Sam,
I was being somewhat facetious with that statement. I think the concern is that given this was a between subjects design and there were different groups of women and men in the neutral and negative conditions, there was no attempt to consider individual differences in memory capacity. These individual differences have the potential to wreak havoc in small samples!
Megan
Sam Loy
logged in via Facebook
That's a really good point, Reema. Cheers.
Michael Livingston
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at The University of New South Wales at University of New South Wales
Absolutely. They're also the kind of results that tend to get picked up by media and repeated again and again. Having read Cordelia Fine's book in the last year, I've really realised how much people focus on gender differences and how lazily they fall back on biological explanations for any differences that they identify.
Bonnie Claire Wintle
PhD student at University of Melbourne
Thanks for your article, Megan.
Reema (ed.) also asked me to read and give my impressions of this paper, and they were similar to yours. For the record, here was my synopsis:
It seems the discussion and conclusions aren't really supported by the results. They have two main conclusions:
1) Women who read negative news excerpts had a significant increase in cortisol (stress hormone) in response to a subsequent stressor (the TSST protocol)
Read more2) Women in the negative news condition experienced…
Craig Minns
Self-employed
Hi Bonnie,
The range of individual differences may be large, but that doesn't imply anything statistically useful without having more data on the distribution. For example, men might have a mean response that is considerably offset from the women's mean response, despite significant overlap in range.
It is oversimplifying to extremes to mention only the overlap in range, without knowing anything about the distribution.
I haven't read the study and I'm not commenting on it.It sounds somewhat plausible, but very limited.
Bonnie Claire Wintle
PhD student at University of Melbourne
Hi Craig - agreed, sex-based differences may be there, but given the variability and number of factors that might affect cortisol levels, genuine differences may be difficult to detect without a high-powered, carefully controlled study. It's no easy task though, especially getting a sufficiently large sample of participants.
Linus Bowden
management consultant
Hey Megan. I actually participated in a study almost identical to this one years ago. All 1st year Psychology students had to participate in a few research projects run by the faculty and PhD students for credit. In my study, subjects were chosen from students who recorded having a significant traumatic experience in their childhood, such as a major accident, and all sorts of others. Once a week for 4 weeks, we had to go this room, where the Professor left us to spend about 1 hour writing about that…
Read moreShauna Murray
Research Fellow
Thanks for an interesting article.
So this study doesn't seem to be the one to answer the question that has been posed. I would still be interested in finding out in general if both men and women and/or just one gender is stressed by watching negative news. My sense for myself is that overtly violent or relentlessly negative news footage does cause me unnecessary stress.
I find most so-called 'news' totally unbalanced in presenting the negative. ie. On any one day in Sydney, 100 lives might be saved by emergency services, medical professionals, family members, bystanders etc etc, and 10 lives might be lost through violence. Yet what do the news report on?...
Megan Willis
Lecturer, School of Psychology at Australian Catholic University
Hi Shauna,
While the results of this study don't support the conclusions that have been made in news headlines. That's not to say that there may not be an effect in the population, but rather that there are a great deal of factors that need to be controlled in a study (that weren't in this one) before it would be appropriate to conclude that on average, women are more stressed or more likely to remember negative news items than are men.
My suspicion is that the actual content of the news items would play an important role in what people remember and how the stories affect us. The average number of stories women recalled was a touch under 4 (from 12). I'd be interested to know if there may have been something special about their content.
And yes, completely agree with your comment about the news being unbalanced.
Megan
Effie Best
Retired educator
Thanks for the article, Megan
I particularly like your observation that average scores are treated as if they told us something about all men and all women.
If it were true that women are more reactive to stress than men, this would tell us no more about an individual woman than the well established generalisation that women are shorter than men
Peter Gerard
Retired medical practitioner
It is not surprising to me that there might be differences in response, based on gender, to disturbing news reports. As the article says women tend to be more empathetic and caring. I also remember reading that, in male/female relationships, it is women who tend to remember most vividly[ and mull over] any negative events that occurred in the past; events that the men themselves had either forgotten or thought much less significant.
Also, sex chromosomes[ and thus oestrogen and progesterone] must be playing some part in female responses; the psychological changes that can occur around menopause illustrate this.
Lynne Newington
Lynne Newington is a Friend of The Conversation.
Researcher
I'm taking the opportunity to re-iterate the effect it has on mothers and their now adult children, when they see or hear anything symbolising the religious establishment that has destroyed their lives.
I'm unsure what the stress levels of the fathers would be or how would deal with it.