That study didn't measure emotions, it measured the way that people report their emotions to a 3rd party monitor - very different. And differences in self reporting bias are an area of study as well because they've been found to have corrupted all sorts of psych research - hint: women seem to have a greater tendency to report what they believe they 'should' report, even when their reports are anonymized.
Not only that, but also the study doesn't assess intensity of emotions, i.e. how strongly they feel that emotion, which is probably an even more important metric in measuring emotionality than just range of emotions. Lastly, what happens in response to emotion is the most important and in my opinion the crux of what people are talking about when discussing emotionality
Great epidode. I'm a fan of her research. However, the design of the study she references on gender differences in emotions is very flawed. Having said this the jury is still out...other better designed (BUT STILL HIGHLY FLAWED) studies reach opposite conclusions. She is guilty of cherry picking here. Bottom line we fundamentally need more information on sex differences in the brain and mind (yes they are intertwined but very different concepts).
@@TremendousSax the sample sizes tend to be small and the experience is self reported... behavior differences and subjective experience show sex differences when you choose different measurement methodologies. Moreover the studies fail to cotrol for meta cognition. You are reminding people to "check in" with their feelings instead of measuring their own perspectives on significant events or experiences (ie events significant enough to notice their emotional state unprompted). She could simply be measuring very noisy daily life and not a range of emotional experiences. Regardless, men and boys don't naturally do this very well. You ask ask most boys how they feel and they often get frustrated. Those circuits don't get hooked up until adolescence and they are not fully baked till mid 20s. Women and girls experience a much greater ability to reason and verbalize information about their emotional state. Even some of Barret's own FMRI investigations confirm this fact. It's likely she's letting politics or bias influence her. It's possible she really believes this stuff but that's faith, not science. It's also possible that presenting her findings honestly would not be good for her career. You get ostracized pretty quickly in most psychology departments if you say sex differences are obviously a HUGE deal. They call you names like "biological essentialist" or "TERF" etc. Who knows why she's saying this stuff... but it's difficult to reconcile with what else we know and the reproducibility crisis certainly increases the difficulty. Studies that quantify behavior, psycometrics, or direct measurement techniques like FMRI are a lot harder screw up. Bottom line if you look at the work by Dan Siegel you'll discover that intention and attention are of critical importance when evaluating subjective experience. Moreover, when you look at the distribution of experience and data you find the most pronounced differences in the variance. Meaning that the underlying organizational principles could be quite different between the sexes but also quite capable of converging on a similar steady state experience or baseline for both genders. This hypothesis is most consistent with what we know about sexual dimorphism regardless of the focus (biological, physiological, psycological social) or organism (rats, bugs, birds, apes, people etc).
@@TremendousSax I'll make the design flaw in the study explicit by giving you an example of a similarly flawed measurem of sex difference. Arm strength. Participants will need to lift a 10 lb weight up to shoulder height using only one hand. If you have a small number of adult men and women and ask them to report the difficulty of the task it is unlikely many of them would report any difficulty. Tracking the movement of the weight would confirm this observation. Concluding from this measurement that men and women have similar physical capabilities and similar upper body strength would be a mistake. Men have 3 times the upper body strength as women. This would only become noticeable with the methodology described above if you had an extremely large sample size because a few women and even fewer men would report that the task was subjectively difficult or challenging... thus measuring a sex difference in a trivial or common experience requires an extremely large sample size. Now lets randomize the weight so that participants receive a weight between 5 pounds and 25 pounds and we also make sure that the chances of receiving any given weight is unknown but possibly different between the genders. Now we have an accurate representation of this study but we're not measuring something simple like upper body strength were measuring a high dimensional complex dynamic mental state that's dynamically linked to the measurement methodology itself... its noisy...
@Sparkle Plenty no. I'm a scientists trying to teach someone who asked a legitimate question about a topic I'm already very familiar with. I bought and read her book when it came out and would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more. However much I enjoyed learning about her research and ideas about the mind they are both critically flawed. Regardless they are fresh and intriguing because the reason that she has an opportunity to present them is because the existing paradigm is ALSO critically flawed. I recommend reading the mindful brain by Dan Siegel to get a better feel for the context where her ideas might come into play. It's a good practical introduction into better understanding how minds emerge from brains. It's also provides a very useful guide for learning about how to exercise certain parts of the brain involving mirror neurons. Honestly the flaws in the work she's discussing are bush league. It should not have made it to publication. But this area of academia became very lax in the 90s. To learn more about analyzing this kind of thinking I recommend looking at some of Bret Weinstein's Darkhorse podcasts avaliable on RU-vid as well as searching through some of the wonderful content devoted to probability and statistics there's probably 5 or six decent channels on RU-vid. Let me know if you want a reference to one.
@James Nicholl you make some good points. However we do know a few things from measuring and mapping brain activity in real time. Emotions are not subjective they are information channels and they provide context and state. Her points are well reasoned but not supported by the evidence at hand. The reason many boys find the question frustrating is because they don't have the circuitry in place to understand how to address the question. The evidence of this fact o human development IS conclusive but not accepted because it's politically inconvenient. However what her research shows is that people learn to speak the same dialect of the same emotional language regardless of gender which is not surprising. Her research sheds very little light ontheir respective subjective experiences. However, other research does. Like i said in an earlier post the starting point for that conversation is Dan Siegel's work (the mindful brain).
This also did not measure how their emotions effected ones actions and how they treated others. Plus the scale was relitive to each person. It was merialy messuring the varabilty in one emotional state most likely based on that persons emtional history.. Its an intresting study but you cant really reach any conclusions from it. Without major follow up.
Lisa! I can’t believe you don’t know the real science on carbohydrates. Please read “Nature Wants Us to be Fat.” Silly title, deeply researched. Your model needs updating.
