Review recent research investigating the effects of gender and culture on brain structure and function.
What will be an ideal response?
Students' examples may vary.
The answer should contain the following information:
Most males tend to show greater lateralization of language in the left hemisphere. For them, language is clearly relegated largely to the left side of the brain. In contrast, women display less lateralization, with language abilities apt to be more evenly divided between the two hemispheres. Such differences in brain lateralization may account, in part, for the superiority often displayed by females on certain measures of verbal skills, such as the onset and fluency of speech.
Other research suggests that men's brains are somewhat bigger than women's brains even after taking differences in body size into account. In contrast, part of the corpus callosum, a bundle of fibers that connects the hemispheres of the brain, is proportionally larger in women than in men.
Men and women also may process information differently. For example, in one study, fMRI brain scans of men making judgments discriminating real from false words showed activation of the left hemisphere of the brain, whereas women used areas on both sides of the brain.
Furthermore, newer research suggests that most brains contain elements of male and female characteristics. Such findings contradict the notion that a brain is essentially either male or female.
Culture also gives rise to differences in brain lateralization. For example, the volume of gray-matter material in the cortex is greater in higher-income adolescents than in low-income adolescents. Native speakers of Japanese seem to process information regarding vowel sounds primarily in the brain's left hemisphere. In contrast, North and South Americans, Europeans, and individuals of Japanese ancestry who learn Japanese later in life handle vowel sounds principally in the right hemisphere.
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Which of the following provides a rationale for why Westerners from industrialized countries are more likely than people from primitive cultures to be fooled by certain optical illusions?
A. Industrial Revolution theory B. urban living theory C. carpentered world hypothesis D. natural perception hypothesis
Studies on actuarial vs. clinical prediction by Meehl, Sawyer, and Sines have indicated that a set of rules is
a. more accurate than inexperienced professional practitioners. b. about as accurate as trained. c. more accurate than trained professional practitioners only when they don't know the rules. d. more accurate than the interpretations of trained professional practitioners even when they know the rules.
According to catharsis theory, ____
a. expressing negative emotions produces a healthy release and is therefore good for the psyche b. practicing emotional restraint of negative emotions (i.e., holding in negative emotions) can help to dissipate, or reduce, such emotions across time c. ironically, people tend to feel unpleasant emotions when they have survived a negative experience when others have suffered d. emotions tend to promote interpersonal ties
Beth was an average student in college. But in graduate school, she proved to be skilled at coping with novel situations and generating many possible solutions to problems. Robert Sternberg would say that Beth had a lot of __________ intelligence
a. analytical c. practical b. creative d. experimental