Alison Escalante writes:

It is not a compliment to call someone “emotional.” We incorrectly see emotion as the opposite of the “rational” or “effective,” even though neuroscientists have long known that emotion is what drives intelligent thought.

Now scientists have just revealed another area where we get emotion completely wrong. Despite centuries of stereotypes, a new study finds that men are just as emotional as women. Men have the same ups and downs, highs and lows as women do. And that is good news for all of us.

Why are we all so sure that women are more emotional than men? There are two main reasons:

First, there is a long history of classifying emotion in a pejorative way and then blaming that on the uterus. In the 19th century, women were considered prone to a uniquely female problem: hysteria. The idea was that women were emotional and unstable and likely to develop behavioral problems, and men couldn’t be because they didn’t have a uterus. Hysterical females were often treated with hysterectomies.

In the 20th century, women have largely been excluded from research (even that used to understand women). Seriously. According to the study authors, this was “partly due to the assumption that ovarian hormone fluctuations lead to variation, especially in emotion, that could not be experimentally controlled.” Those hormonal women were just too unpredictable to be studied. So instead of using science to find out if these assumptions about emotions and female hormones were true, researchers simply ignored women and studied men instead. [Continue reading…]