Think first..give your S the benefit of doubt

[cat03]

I just have to post tid bits of this awesome book I'm reading, hope it helps

From: "The secrets of happily married men" (which by the way, I read it on my own, because handing a R book to a husband is like handing a diet book to a wife: "what? you think I'm fat??"... you get my drift right?)
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The Amygdala
This section of the brain hadles aggression and the emotional connection to events. Interesting studies of the amygdala have found that when men and women are exposed to pictures of sad or frightened people and asked to imagine what they are thinking, their amygdalas light up. But then the researchers not that the men’s amygdalas shut down in a few minutes, and higher cortical functions light up; men simply dont' hold on to emotional responses very long before searching for a rational response to process the emotion. The female brain lingers longer on the negative feeligns.
Lets say for example, that your Aunt Jo dies unexpectedly. You (husband) and your wife will both feel the emotions typically associated with grief, but *you* may be quicker to move to the practical side of things: "When will the wake and funeral be? I have an important meeting on Tuesday." Your wife will probably say hateful things about your insensitivity and wonder how you can be so cold. But the fact is, after processing the feeligns of grief, your brain shifted your thoughts into the rational realm. That's not wrong -- it is just different from teh way your wife will deal with the death.

The Hippocampus
When an emotional event passes, females tend to hold on to the memory, whereas males tend to let it go. That particular difference can be traces to the brains' hippocampus (the memory center). It is larger in women and has more neural pathways from it to emotive centers. That's why women remember emotional events more than men.
....A man will remember less of his emotional experiences than a woman will.

...Although the amygdala is larger in men than in women, this is a case where bigger isn't necessarily better. The amygdala scans the signals that enter the brain and stands sentry, ready to light up in recognition of a friendly smile, or send out an alarm if it perceives any threats. When triggered, the amygdala relases a flood of stress hormones into the bloodstream. This flloding shurts down the "thinking" part of the brain, freezes teh body to prepare for assault, and prepares the memory centers to retain any necessary infromation for future reference.

...Another reason is that even when our emotional reactions are equally strong, men tend to be better able to shurt down their amygdala and redirect their brain activity back to the cortex--the palce where logical thought takes over. This may seem like emotional coldness to women, but to men it may be a way of making sure our emotions dont' get int he way of getting the job done.

That is not to say that men can't, or don't, experience negative emotions. In fact, studies show his amygdala is much more responsive to sadness than his wife's. But unlike women, men will shurt down the amygdala to keep the cortex in thus appear ever confident and emotional stable.
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