Men MUCH More Forgetful Than Women. Much, much more.

Men forgetting anniversaries or birth dates is a cliché of cliché's in life as in fiction.  Unlike many givens based on common experience, this tendency is now validated by research out of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  To put it in simplest terms, whether due to hereditary or enculturation, men are far more forgetful than women.  Much more forgetful.  Much, much more.  All  men.  Across the board.
The perfect gift for
the man in your life.
Before you kill him.
This explains why we men can never find our keys.  It's a wonder that we can find our way home after work.  Yet I can tell you who threw the key block on Cowboy's defensive tackle Jethro Pugh that sprang Packer quarterback Bart Starr for the winning touchdown in the historic 1966 Ice Bowl football game.  Center Kenny Bowman and right guard Jerry Kramer.  Go figure.  Where are my car keys?  Another question.

 What were we talking about?  

 Right.  

 Forgetfulness in men.  Here's the research report:

If your husband is absent-minded, forgets your wedding anniversary or the name of your new neighbor, don't worry. You are not the only one with a forgetful man in the house. Even researchers were surprised by how much men forget.

"It was surprising to see that men forget more than women. This has not been documented before. It was also surprising to see that men are just as forgetful whether they are 30 or 60 years old. The results were unambiguous," says Professor Jostein Holmen, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, published in BMC Psychology in late 2013.

What did I do one year ago?
Holmen and his co-workers asked nine questions about how well people think they remember as a part of a large longitudinal population health study conducted in mid-Norway called HUNT3.  HUNT3 is one of the largest health studies ever performed, with answers from over 48,000 people as part of the research material.

The participants were asked how often they had problems remembering things, whether they had problems with remembering names and dates, if they could remember what they did one year ago and if they were able to remember details from conversations. Men reported the most problems for eight out of nine questions.

"We speculated about why men report more frequent problems with remembering than women do, but have not been able to find an explanation. This is still an unsolved mystery," says Holmen.

Higher education associated with better memory
Women have the same problems with remembering as men do, but to a lesser extent. Names and dates are also hardest to remember for women.

These problems accelerate with age, but to a much lesser extent than the researchers believed before.

  • Women forget just as much whether they are 30 or 50 years old. 
  • People who are more highly educated forget less than those with less education. 
  • People who suffer from anxiety or depression forget more than other people do. This is true for people of both sexes.

Importance for dementia
Memory problems begin to accelerate overall in the 60-70 year-old group, the researchers found.  Holmen wants to see whether people who self-reported problems with remembering at a younger age are also at a higher risk of developing dementia.

"That was the reason why we included these questions. It is important to emphasize that we still don't know what clinical importance these problems with remembering have. But we might know this in a few years. Problems with remembering at a younger age might not have any importance either. I know this from my own experience, but now I know that I am not alone," Holmen says.

Holmen, by the way, was born in 1947.
*  * * * *  

Story Source:  Jostein Holmen, Ellen Langballe, Kristian Midthjell, Turid Holmen, Arvid Fikseaunet, Ingvild Saltvedt, Kristian Tambs. Gender differences in subjective memory impairment in a general population: the HUNT study, Norway. BMC Psychology, 2013

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the lives of Georgian gaolbirds and highwaymen shaped modern Britain

Image
Writing historical fiction requires solid research of available materials and databases.  The key word here is available.   So news of a new publicly accessible database that allows an author to research a very interesting past era is priceless almost beyond words.   I expect some exciting fiction to come out of this announcement. Here's the story, with a link to the source in the attribution. *  *  *  *  * London Lives, a landmark project led by Professor Bob Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield and Professor Tim Hitchcock from the University of Sussex, has uncovered a mass of extraordinary new evidence which reveals how the lives of thousands of 18th-century poor and criminal Londoners helped shape modern Britain. Based on evidence made available in a publicly available database, the study sheds new light on the everyday lives of thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, highwaymen, con-men, paupers and jailbirds, revealing how their daily fight for survival led to t
Read more

An unexpected way to recover from a breakup

Image
Breaking up is truly hard to do. And recovery from a breakup can be even harder. Your friends may counsel you to put the whole thing out of your mind. But new research suggests that repeatedly reflecting on a break-up -- even through participation in a research study -- actually speeds emotional recovery. "Breakups are ubiquitous -- most adults have experienced at least one in their life -- and are typically very distressing," says Grace Larson of Northwestern University. After studying divorce and breakups for years using longitudinal, multi-method designs, Larson and her then-adviser David Sbarra of the University of Arizona wanted to study whether these research techniques on their own were affecting participants. One concern they had was that the studies could be harming participants, Larson says. "At first glance, it might seem like repeatedly reminding participants that they had just broken up -- and asking them to describe the breakup over and over --
Read more

Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought

Image
Source: www.shef.ac.uk The charred remains of Assiros Toumba in Greece. Writing historical fiction set in the Greek Bronze Age?  Or simply enjoy reading this genre'?  Here's a study you may find interesting. C onventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses. While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier. www.weather-forecast.com Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham selected 60 samples of animal bones, plant remains and building timbers, excavated at Assiros in northern Greece, to be radiocarbon dated and correlated with 95.4% accuracy using Bayesian statistical methodology at the University of Oxford and the Akademie der Wissenschaften Heidelberg, Germany. Researcher Dr Ken Wardle says, 'These new results tell a story that is totall
Read more

Mood Instability and Your Characters

Image
You're putting together a character who's mood simply bounces all over the place, happy one moment, in a fit of rage the next.  Researchers at King's College London note that this sort of mood instability is part of a number of mental health disorders.  So how do you structure the personality and behavior of a character like this?  Below is the King's College report, along with a brief description from mentalhealth.com, of typical behavior, sometimes in the extreme, of a person who is very emotionally unstable.  This is offered strictly as a guide for crafting character in fiction - and NOT for the amateur diagnosis of the state of someone's mental health.  That is always best left to trained professionals. Another note about emotionally unstable behavior:  as any parent will tell you, this is how adolescents and teen-agers often behave.  It's a normal part of growing up - but it is a matter of degree .  In the extreme, however, this behavior can be diag
Read more

Remember faces but not names? You got it wrong.

Image
Source:   Daily Excelsior So, you think you're good at remembering faces, but terrible with names? New research has revealed we are actually better at remembering names than faces The cringe-worthy experience of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name leads many of us to believe we are terrible with names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. With the Christmas party season fast approaching, there will be plenty of opportunity to re-live the familiar, and excruciatingly-awkward, social situation of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name. This cringe-worthy experience leads many of us to believe we are terrible at remembering names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. The authors of the study, from the University of York, suggest that when we castigate ourselves f
Read more