Women better at recall under stress

Put a woman in a stressful situation and she is likely to remember conversations and verbal learning better than men, a study has shown.

Put a woman in a stressful situation and she is likely to remember conversations and verbal learning better than men, a study has shown.

Published Jul 24, 2015

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Cape Town - Put a woman in a stressful situation and she is likely to remember conversations and verbal learning better than men, a study has shown.

Christopher du Plooy’s doctoral thesis, “The effects of acute stress on visual and spatial memory retrieval”, shows that when stressed, women are far more likely to remember verbal engagement than men.

Du Plooy, a PhD graduate from UCT, made a group of 45 men and 45 women memorise a series of word pairings.

The next day they were put through a stress test, where they were given time to prepare a five-minute speech to pitch to two “judges” to appear on the Fear Factor TV show.

This was followed by a mental arithmetic exercise and participants then plunged their hands into cold water for two minutes.

Participants’ heart rates increased, as did their level of sweating, an indication that they were under stress.

Du Plooy then tested them on the word pairings. Participants had to recall which words went with each other, and his research found that women were by far more likely to remember the words than men.

When the group were given prednisone, an anti-inflammatory, the recall in men and women was lower.

Prednisone is cortisol, which is produced by the body and creates the flight or fight response.

Du Plooy said the stress response was a way to cope and to find a way to survive in a tense or life-threatening situation.

He said the study showed that just the right amount of stress was needed to be able to have verbal memory recall.

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