Posted by Larry Hoover on May 2, 2005, at 8:50:04
In reply to Re: Why is it everyone here is a woman? » pinkeye, posted by alexandra_k on May 1, 2005, at 20:43:06
> > I am just noticing and observing, that all of us here who continue to babble are all women. How come nobody here is a male?
>
> We do get some guys over here. Damos comes here sometimes. And Broken. And Toph.And Lar.
> But yeah, mostly women over here. I've noticed that too.
>
> > I am asking this question mainly becuase, if men are not into psychology and emotions so much, why do they become therapists in the first place?
>
> Well, isn't it obvious? TO PICK UP WOMEN!!! Ha ha, I am kidding of course ;-)If I may be so bold as to invoke stereotypes as an explanation, men tend to have high levels of pattern recognition abilities. Moreover, this cognitive recognition process is less encumbered by the concurrent emotional processing for which women's brains are known. Brain imaging shows that women have processing activity that is far more generalized, by region, and of higher net intensity, than the region-specific processing of men. E.g. spoken language "lights up" the emotional and language processing parts of women's brains, in equal measure. A male, however, shows high activity only in the language processing area. Both have similar occasional increases in frontal activity (planning, concept).
Not that this physical difference explains anything, but it might be a good clue. Mars/Venus.
> I wonder if it has something to do with the issues that we tend to gravitate towards on the pscychology board. We tend to get pretty intense with attachment and erotic transference stuff etc etc.
Ya. Not an issue for me.
> I wonder if that tends to be less of a problem for guys?
Even if it does occur, I suspect it is a different kind of problem.
> Or if guys tend to do better with something like CBT which is more problem focused rather than more reflective.
See? Maybe that's it. I was thinking in terms of CBT, above.
> I mean - a tendancy rather than a general rule.
Tendencies are the basis of stereotypy. We wouldn't have stereotypes without recognizing trends. It's the invocation of absolute thinking in stereotypy that creates the problems: e.g. racism, sexism, etc. We just need to cancel the general rules. ;-)
> I'm not sure. I'd be interested to hear from guys, though.
In my own case, I seem to have an adverse effect on threads here. Often, my post is the last post in a thread.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:492492
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050428/msgs/492595.html