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Keep calm! Gender differences in mental rotation performance are modulated by habitual expressive suppression

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Abstract

Men have been frequently found to perform more accurately than women in mental rotation tasks. However, men and women also differ with regard to the habitual use of emotion regulation strategies, particularly with regard to expressive suppression, i.e., the suppression of emotional expression in behavior. As emotional suppression is more often used by men, emotion regulation strategies might be a variable modulating gender differences in mental rotation performance. The present study, therefore, examined the influences of gender and emotion regulation strategies on mental rotation performance accuracy and feedback processing. Twenty-eight men and 28 women matched for relevant demographic variables performed mental rotation tasks of varying difficulty over a prolonged time. Emotional feedback was given immediately after each trial. Results showed that women reported to use expressive suppression less frequently than men. Women made more errors in the mental rotation task than men confirming earlier demonstrations of gender differences. Furthermore, women were more impaired by the negative feedback as indicated by the increased likelihood of subsequent errors compared with men. Task performance of women not habitually using expressive suppression was most inferior and most strongly influenced by failure feedback compared with men. Women using expressive suppression more habitually did not significantly differ in mental rotation accuracy and feedback processing from men. Hence, expressive suppression reduces gender differences in mental rotation accuracy by improving cognitive performance following failure feedback.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Kerstin Krupp and Stefanie Müller for their help during data acquisition.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Section for Cognitive Electrophysiology, University of Ulm, Leimgrubenweg 12, 89075, Ulm, Germany

    Anne-Katharina Fladung & Markus Kiefer

  2. Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Anne-Katharina Fladung

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  1. Anne-Katharina Fladung
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  2. Markus Kiefer
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Correspondence to Markus Kiefer.

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The study was not funded. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Fladung, AK., Kiefer, M. Keep calm! Gender differences in mental rotation performance are modulated by habitual expressive suppression. Psychological Research 80, 985–996 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0704-7

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