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American Morning
Interview With Turhan Canli
Aired July 23, 2002 - 07:49 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ARTHEL NEVILLE, CNN ANCHOR: Well, you know, what they say about married couples? Husbands never remember, and wives never forget. Well, who knew there would be scientific proof of that?
Using photographs like these we are going to show you, psychologists put gender memory to the test. Twelve men and 12 women first rated their emotional response, and then were asked how they -- how well they remembered the last three weeks. OK? We are talking about all of these pictures three weeks later. Well, the study suggests that women are wired to feel and recall emotions men are not.
And one of the authors, psychologist Turhan Canli, is here now. Welcome and good morning to you.
TURHAN CANLI, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, SUNY STONY BROOK: Thank you very much -- thanks for having me.
NEVILLE: OK, so how does this work? The couple has an argument. A week later, the guy doesn't remember, the woman does. Why is that?
CANLI: Well, I wouldn't say that the guy doesn't remember at all. He remembers a little bit. He just doesn't remember as well as the wife does. And it's probably because he...
NEVILLE: Selective retention.
CANLI: Possibly so. I mean, I think part of it has to do with the fact that the experience of the emotion and taking that experience and, you know, coding it into memory, deciding that it's actually worthwhile remembering, are two separate things.
And in our study, what we found was that women were -- that the brains of women were better at integrating these two processes than the brains of men.
NEVILLE: OK. I want to get -- move on here and get to some pictures of MRIs, because I understand that's part of how you conducted the study, correct...
CANLI: Yes.
NEVILLE: ... if you could explain it to us.
CANLI: What we did was we presented -- we put people into the scanner, and presented emotional images or less emotional images to them while they were placed in the scanner. For each picture that they saw, they had an opportunity to rate the emotional intensity that they subjected to the experience to each person for themselves for each picture that they saw.
And then three weeks later, we would do a memory test, so a surprise memory test, to ask them, do you remember seeing this picture or not? And what you can see on this graphic here is a particular part of the brain, which is called the amygdala, a structure well- known to be involved in emotional memory processing.
When you look at the left-hand column, the image of the women, there is a role there called experience and a role called memory. It shows you that...
NEVILLE: OK, so break -- I need you to break this down in laymen's terms and basically tell me, so what am I seeing here? What does this tell me?
CANLI: You are looking at a slice of brain tissue, and the red blobs on it indicate reasons of activation that are associated either with the emotional experience or with the emotional memory. When you look at the women, it's in the same place. The experience and the memory is processed in the same location. When you look at the men, the experience is on the left...
NEVILLE: OK.
CANLI: ... and the memory is on the right.
NEVILLE: I see.
CANLI: They are not connected to each other.
NEVILLE: I see. I see. OK, so let's look at some other pictures then, and tell me how the women reacted to them vs. how the men reacted to them.
CANLI: Oh, OK.
NEVILLE: Let's start with -- because we saw the snake in the outlet earlier.
CANLI: Right.
NEVILLE: Let's start with -- let's see, what do we have here? A picture of an electric chair.
CANLI: Yes. So people would rate this as pretty emotionally intense, because everyone understands what this stands for, what it represents. We would get some images where men and women agreed that they were pretty emotionally intense.
NEVILLE: OK, but...
CANLI: Others not. NEVILLE: OK, but what about this one? Women -- did they agree?
CANLI: With this one, people would agree.
NEVILLE: OK.
CANLI: Now, this one doesn't look very emotional to me. It probably doesn't look that emotional to you, either.
NEVILLE: But possibly to a woman, because it kind of looks like a baby spoon maybe.
CANLI: That's true.
NEVILLE: See?
CANLI: That's true.
NEVILLE: See?
CANLI: It's possible that there is some interpretation with what you're looking at right? And so, in a sense, this is a great example. The image of the gun is one that -- is one of the most negatively rated images amongst women when they look at this.
NEVILLE: Right.
CANLI: Men would rate this marginally neutral, if not slightly positive even. They would look at it...
NEVILLE: The power.
CANLI: ... and think that it's very cool. So the emotional response can be quite, quite varied. This is just a very random picture of an everyday object, a fire hydrant. So people would agree that this is just a neutral image.
It gives you a sense of the range of images that we saw, that we presented in this study. A totally random set of pictures, some were very emotional, some were less emotional. Some men and women agreed on, some they didn't.
NEVILLE: The fire hydrant did nothing for me. Just...
CANLI: I am glad to hear that.
NEVILLE: Again, just quickly, if you can do it concisely for us, the difference between men and women and how we react to emotions.
CANLI: Well, what we found was that the integration of emotional experience and taking that experience into memory was much more tightly coupled in the brains of women than in the brains of men. And that went along with a better performance in an emotional memory task that was an advantage that we saw in the women.
So there is a biological mechanism that we see here that might be at play that enhances emotional memory in women.
NEVILLE: Well, that's very interesting, Doctor. Dr. Canli, I just want to tell you, I know you spent a lot of time conducting that study, but I could have told you that women rock -- bottom line. Thank you very much.
CANLI: Well, yes, I would agree with you on that, and I don't think we need an imaging study for that.
NEVILLE: It was nice to see you this morning -- thank you.
CANLI: OK, it was good meeting you.
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