Sex-related talkativeness and emotional memory

Emotionally arousing events are more likely to be recalled compared to non-arousing events. Moreover, recent studies have begun to reveal seemingly large, but previously unsuspected, sex-related influences on this mechanism, and sex differences in cognition are consistently reported. Sex-related differences in language processing are well known from everyday life, as well as from the scientific literature. Our previous studies indicated that both sex and cerebral hemisphere constitute important interacting influences on neural correlates of emotion and emotional memory. Moreover, many data evidenced sex-related differences in language processing and conversational behaviour. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to evaluate possible talkativeness differences between the two sexes in the recollection of emotional stimuli, recording the number of words that men and women use when they are submitted to a declarative memory test, using two kinds of emotional stimuli: the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), a set of calibrated picture stimuli, and an Italian adaptation of two versions of a story, differing for their arousal characteristics (neutral and emotional), both widely used for investigating emotion and emotional memory. The evaluation of the number of words, utilized by men and women during the free recall of both kind of stimuli, showed that women used always an higher number of words compared to men. In conclusion, according to previous studies indicating that men and women process emotional stimuli differently, our findings suggest the existence of gender-related neural responses to emotional stimuli and could also contribute to the understanding of mechanisms underlying the gender disparity of neuropsychiatric diseases, such as mood disorders.