Women's Brains Better at Handling Anger

Sept. 25 -- Is it true, as the old nursery rhyme claims, that little girls are made of "sugar and spice and everything nice," and little boys are made of "slugs and snails and puppy dog tails?"

Well, not exactly, but it may not be entirely wrong, either.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine say they have evidence that shows there is a physiological reason for why men are more aggressive than women. Men tend to be more hot headed than women, the researchers suggest, because our brains are fundamentally different.

In a nutshell, the research indicates that men are more aggressive than women because the part of the brain that modulates aggression is smaller in men than it is in women. Both genders have about the same ability to produce emotions, but when it comes to keeping those emotions in check, men have been shortchanged.

Battling Brain Parts

The research is part of an ongoing effort by a husband and wife team who are using the latest tools of their trade to peer inside the human brain and see what's really going on. Psychologist Ruben C. Gur, director of Penn's Brain Behavior Laboratory, and psychiatrist Raquel E. Gur have completed several research projects showing that a sizeable portion of human behavior can be laid directly at the doorstep of neurological differences in the brain, especially between the two genders.

They have shown, for example, that just because men have bigger heads than women, they aren't smarter. Women's brains are smaller, but they have a higher processing capacity, thus offsetting the difference.

For their latest project, published in a recent issue of the Journal of the Cerebral Cortex, the Gurs made use of past research that shows that different areas of the brain are responsible for different functions. The region at the base of the brain includes the amygdala, which is involved in emotional arousal and excitement. A frontal area around the eyes, called the "orbital frontal cortex," is involved in the modulation of aggression.