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by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.
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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

Do Women Respond Differently to Stress? Maybe.

Tuesday April 2, 2002

In a wonderful book entitled The Demon Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan gave the world a "baloney detection kit." This kit can be an effective tool that supports the wellness skill of thinking critically. The "kit" is particularly effective for assessing a sales pitch of one kind or another. It can serve you in efforts to root out fallacious, fraudulent arguments. The kit includes the following principles:

Check for independent confirmation of alleged facts.
Encourage substantive debate by informed proponents of all points of view -- and look closely at the evidence presented.
Don't be impressed by arguments that rely on authority.
Look for several hypotheses -- don't settle on the first idea that comes to mind.
Avoid becoming attached to a hypothesis, even if it's your own or supports a point you favor.
Quantify, if possible.
If there is a chain involved in the argument, know that every part of the chain must work or hold for the argument to be effective.
If two or more hypotheses are possible, select that which is simpler. This is known as "Occam's Razor." (Pardon the diversion at this point but, in case you wondered, William of Occam was an English philosopher and theologian who lived from 1284 to 1347. Occam did influential work in the areas of logic and scientific inquiry. He insisted that scientific knowledge should be based upon logical propositions between experience and self-evident truths. He emphasized the Aristotelian principle that entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary, which led to the phrase "Occam's Razor," also known as "the law of parsimony." In short, a problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms, thus, the simplest theory that fits the facts is the one that should be selected.)
Look to see if the hypothesis can be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test.) A hypothesis should be testable, that is, able to be duplicated by others who will get the same result.

I thought of Sagan's tips when reading a report published in "Psychological Review" in July of 2000. In a study at UCLA, a group of researchers claimed results at odds with nearly everything known about the stress response -- where women were concerned. This triggered my instinct to get out the baloney detection kit - you should always be skeptical when someone claims a result different from known evidence. The claim may be a genuine breakthrough, but, more often than not, it is less than that.

The study claimed that women produce a hormonal cascade of brain chemicals that lead not to the classical fight or flight response but rather to friendships with other women! Like the fight or flight response, which the researchers claimed does indeed apply to males, the female response is also attributed to an ancient survival mechanism left over from the saber-toothed tiger days when obesity was not the epidemic in America that it is today. The researchers, who are women themselves, identified a hormone called oxytocin which they explained is released as part of the female stress response. Oxytocin, they argue, calms women and leads them to protect children and gather with other women rather than fleeing or fighting. To me, this does not seem an effective way to deal with a saber-tooth tiger, or a menacing dog for that matter. I'm just being skeptical, though, as Dr. Sagan would want me to be.

Men under stress, the researchers suggest, produce testosterone in such high levels that the calming effects of the oxytocin are overridden. On the other hand, estrogen seems to enhance the effects of oxytocin.

The women researchers commented that nearly ninety percent of research on the stress response has been done with male subjects, which they say explains why this factor has been overlooked. They also claim that the "tend and befriend" notion they discovered may explain why women outlive men -- strong social ties reduce the risks of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rates and cholesterol levels.

What do YOU think? Are you buying it?

According to the baloney detection kit, you should not buy it nor reject it, but consider the evidence. I don't know the answers to the following questions, but these are a few of the queries that should be addressed to the researchers:

Have any disinterested parties confirmed the alleged facts put forward?
Have those with different views on how stress affects women debated these investigators?
What other explanations might account for the results of this study?
Are the women investigators too strongly attached to their own hypothesis, perhaps because of some feminist agenda?
Have the researchers quantified the extent of the alleged differences in the male versus female response to stress?
Where are the weak links in their chain of evidence supporting their findings?
Have others reproduced these studies, with similar outcomes and if so, have the follow up studies been "double blind" experiments where the person taking measurements was not aware of the sex of the subjects?
Has due attention been given to possible confounding factors, that is, have the investigators separated all the variables?

Whether you are initially impressed or not by any study, it is wise to apply these and related elements of effective decision-making. Doing so is part of the process of being a wise consumer of medical and other information. As to this particular study, I have some checking to do, again in the spirit that one of my heroes, Carl Sagan, would expect. I'm going to try to reach these investigators so stay tuned - there may be another DR on this topic before long.

All the best. Be well and always look on the bright side of life. Cheers.

Domain: mental
Subdomain: effective decisions

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