Book 1 Reading and Speaking (1108795), страница 20
Текст из файла (страница 20)
He adds to the above an interesting explanation of women's current mortality advantage thatcould explain the more recent trends: the dramatic increase in excess male mortality emerged as an equallydramatic progress in the general health conditions of our societies was taking place. He thus argues that beyondthe negative behavioral or environmental factors that affect men more than they do women, there could be verywell be a more fundamental difference in lifestyles that allows women to better benefit from the general progress inhealth.
For example, although women now participate massively in the work force, their roles remain different andtheir professional activities are, on average, less prejudicial to their health. In addition, women often relate to theirbodies, their health and their lives in general in a much different way than men do. To caricature, women seekbeauty, men seek strength and power; thus, a woman's body must remain young and healthy as long as possible,whereas a man's body must be submitted to risks and challenges from an early age. The result is that women,much more than men, are attentive to their bodies and their needs and often carry on deeper dialogs more easilywith their doctors.
Hence, women, being more inclined to take care of their bodies and to prolong their lives, maybe better able to glean greater profit from modern medical and social advances by practicing activities that arehealthier and better protect their bodies. In this context, women's biological advantage now appears relatively minorin the total mortality differences between the sexes.Exercise 3. Are the following statements true or false, according to the text?1. Equal numbers of boys and girls are born every year.2.
Different economies demonstrate great diversity in average life expectancy.3. There are no social factors accounting for the difference in male and female longevity.4. Y-chromosome gives men biological advantage and better survival chances.5. Historically men have enjoyed a better social position than women.6. Men are exposed to a greater number of risk factors than women.7. Women make better use of medical services and modern progress in science.Exercise 4. Sex Differences in the Brain.Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive differences that reflect varying hormonalinfluences on brain development. Before reading the next text guess if the following statements generallyrefer more to men or to women:a.
Men/Women, on average, have stronger verbal skills (especially in writing).b. Men/Women generally are better at mentally manipulating objects.c. Men/Women have better memory for events, words, objects, faces and activities.d. Men/Women are better at performing certain quantitative tasks that rely on visual representations.e. Men/Women can better recognize emotions and show higher levels of empathy.Exercise 5. Read the following article to check some of your answers in Exercise 4.Girl Brain, Boy Brain?The two are not the same, but new work shows just how wrong it is to assume that all gender differences are“hardwired”By Lise EliotAs MRI scanning grows ever more sophisticated, neuroscientists keep refining their search for male-femalebrain differences that will answer the age-old question, “Why can’t a woman think like a man?” (and vice-versa).Social cognition is one realm in which the search for brain sex differences should be especially fruitful.
Females ofall ages outperform males on tests requiring the recognition of emotion or relationships among other people. Sexdifferences in empathy emerge in infancy and persist throughout development, though the gap between adultwomen and men is larger than between girls and boys. The early appearance of any sex difference suggests it isinnately programmed—selected for through evolution and fixed into our behavioral development through eitherprenatal hormone exposure or early gene expression differences.
On the other hand, sex differences that growlarger through childhood are likely shaped by social learning, a consequence of the very different lifestyle, cultureand training that boys and girls experience in every human society.At first glance, studies of the brain seem to offer a way out of this age-old nature/nurture dilemma. Anydifference in the structure or activation of male and female brains is indisputably biological. However, theassumption that such differences are also innate or “hardwired” is invalid, given all we’ve learned about theplasticity, or malleability of the brain.
Simply put, experiences change our brains.Recent research by Peg Nopoulos, Jessica Wood and colleagues at the University of Iowa illustrates justhow difficult it is to untangle nature and nurture, even at the level of brain structure. A first study, published in47March 2008 found that one subdivision of the ventral prefrontal cortex - an area involved in social cognition andinterpersonal judgment, known as the straight gyrus (SG), - is proportionally larger in women, compared to men.(Men’s brains are about 10 percent larger than women’s, overall, so any comparison of specific brain regions mustbe scaled in proportion to this difference.) Wood and colleagues found the SG to be about 10 percent larger in thethirty women they studied, compared to thirty men.
What’s more, they found that the size of the SG correlated witha widely-used test of social cognition, so that individuals (both male and female) who scored higher in interpersonalawareness also tended to have larger SGs.In their article, Wood and colleagues speculate about the evolutionary basis for this sex difference. Perhaps,since women are the primary child-rearers, their brains have become programmed to develop a larger SG, toprepare them to be sensitive nurturers. Prenatal sex hormones are known to alter behavior and certain brainstructures in other mammals. Perhaps such hormones—or sex-specific genes—may enhance the development offemales’ SG (or dampen the development of males’) leading to inborn differences in social cognition.The best way to test this hypothesis is to look at children. If the sex difference in the SG is present early inlife, this strengthens the idea that it is innately programmed.
Wood and Nopoulos therefore conducted a secondstudy with colleague Vesna Murko, in which they measured the same frontal lobe areas in children between 7 and17 years of age. But here the results were most unexpected: they found that the SG is actually larger in boys!What’s more, the same test of interpersonal awareness showed that skill in this area correlated with smaller SG,not larger, as in adults. The authors acknowledge that their findings are “complex,” and argue that the reversalbetween childhood and adulthood reflects the later maturation of boys’ brains, compared to girls. (Adolescents’brains undergo a substantial “pruning” or reduction in gray matter volume during adolescence, which happensabout two years earlier in girls, compared to boys.)However, in both studies, Wood and colleagues added another test that reminds us to be cautious wheninterpreting any finding about sex differences in the brain.
Instead of simply dividing their subjects by biological sex,they also gave each subject a test of psychological “gender:” a questionnaire that assesses each person’s degreeof masculinity vs. femininity—regardless of their biological sex—based on their interests, abilities and personalitytype. And in both adults and children, this measure of “gender” also correlated with SG size, albeit in just ascomplicated a way as the correlation between “sex” and SG size. (Larger SG correlated with more femininepersonality in adults but less feminine personality in children.)In other words, there does seem to be a relationship between SG size and social perception, but it is not asimple male-female difference.
Rather, the SG appears to reflect a person’s “femininity” better than one’s biologicalsex: women who are relatively less feminine show a correspondingly smaller SG compared to women who aremore feminine, and ditto for men.This finding—that brain structure correlates as well or better with psychological “gender” than with simplebiological “sex”—is crucial to keep in mind when considering any comparisons of male and female brains. Yes,men and women are psychologically different and yes, neuroscientists are uncovering many differences in brainanatomy and physiology which seem to explain our behavioral differences.
But just because a difference isbiological doesn’t mean it is “hard-wired.” Individuals’ gender traits—their preference for masculine or feminineclothes, careers, hobbies and interpersonal styles—are inevitably shaped more by rearing and experience than istheir biological sex. Likewise, their brains, which are ultimately producing all this masculine or feminine behavior,must be molded—at least to some degree—by the sum of their experiences as a boy or girl.And so, any time scientists report a difference between male and female brains, especially in adults, it begsthe question, “Nature or nurture?” Is women’s larger SG the cause of their social sensitivity, or the consequence ofliving some 30 years in a group that practices greater empathetic responding? Wood and colleagues are amongthe few neuroscientists to analyze male-female brain differences for their relationship to gender type, as opposed tostrict biological sex.
Their findings do not prove that social learning is the cause of male-female differences in thebrain, but they do challenge the idea that such brain differences are a simple product of the Y chromosome. (FromScientific American Online, September 8, 2009)Exercise 6. Answer the questions using the information from the text:1. Why is social cognition regarded a fruitful area of investigation?2.
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