How stress levels can affect different genders on their personality

Hi All,

I was thinking maybe one more possible future research can be tested on how men and women differ in stress level that is related to their personality. Although men and women tend to equalize the roles they play in the society nowadays, there is still a tendency that people think men needs to make more money for their family and women tends to take care of the family members. Different role play will result into different level and kinds of stress, which will make men and women have different personalities due to the difference in stress levels.

Any thoughts about this possible future research?

Hi Meiri, What you suggested is quite interesting. The effects of occupational and home stress on our well being (mental, physical, and social state) is something I learned about in health psychology, so it would be interesting to know if that kind of stress is related to gender and personality. We know that women and men already have different coping tendencies so it's quite possible there are differences involving stress perception between genders. I actually think we did have some stress related questions as part of the final questionnaire, but maybe if the these type of questions were more structured and researched, perhaps we could have found a correlation in our results (so the quality of the questions could be an area of improvement and a source of limitation) With that said though, I think confounding variables,directionality, and causation would be issues in the research since stress is such a huge topic in health already. Nevertheless, I think you've have made a really good and insightful suggestion !

Hi Meiri and Karen, I think that your ideas point out to something very interesting. There are several things that we could look at in terms of stress and personality/ gender; not only are coping strategies different and the work load for males and females different but also the types of jobs a male vs. female does will create more/less stress since some jobs may induce more stress than others. Although it is true that gender roles in terms of the workforce has become more equal, there are still certain occupations that are lacking in either males or females due to stereotypes. For example, although having women in the police force is growing more accepted, typically men are still found to be the officers. This brings up greater stress in men as they need to find ways to be the breadwinner in the family. However, there also might be more stress for women who do enter the police force since they need to live up to standards that are set for men. This might produce a different kind of stress on each gender, and so we could look at how this might come into play with their personality. So it seems like there are many different aspects of stress that we could look at in the future, connecting with gender/personality differences because of social norms.

Great discussions here!

I just wanted to throw in a bit about causal relationships. Lippa’s Gender, Nature and Nurture has an excellent page on this and I think it can be viewed online. It is a table entitled “Parallel tracks of gender development and their complex interactions” (Lippa, 2005, p. 220) It is an excellent graphic depiction illustrating why causality is so difficult to infer, especially from single studies, GD or otherwise. I mention this because it may also inspire new ideas for GD studies.

Hi Karen, Phoebe and Kevin,

These are all great points to consider for the future study! I totally agree that coping strategies are also really important dealing with stress, if stress level is hard to test it out, the corresponding coping strategies people adapt can be a great future study to associate with personality. Another thing to keep in mind is that women nowadays have accepted to work as equally as men, but they also play an important role at home, this can possibly bring up the role conflict to increase stress levels for women as there is way too much for them to handle. Overall i think coping strategies are a idea to think about!

There are many types of stress, occupational stress is one of the important stress both men and women experience everyday, so I think it is a great type of stress to study for future research. However, although women tend to work equally in today's society as men, some women still do no work; this brings up a limitation which we can only study women with a job for occupational stress. Nevertheless it is a good future research to conduct.

Great idea. How might the new Gender Diagnosticity scale we've designed help here? do you think asking about gender diagnosticity might tell us more about people's response to stress than just asking their gender itself?

I think it might tell us something about their response in a more subconscious level since the items might not be directly addressing their stressful situation or coping strategies. I believe it might be seen as a projective test measuring gender difference to stressors, which we learned in class has its pros and cons.

While we are talking about how stress affects personalities and the incidence of mental disorders on one gender or the other, I think future research on how sexual abuse and violence in general intersect with gender diagnosticity could be of interest. Men are outnumbered by women in this category, and due to the fact that the consequences of sexual abuse and violence are lingering and are difficult to overcome, they should affect an individual's personality - especially if the abuse happens during the years of formation.