Wednesday, September 14, 2005

'Stiff upper lip' hampers memory

'Stiff upper lip' hampers memory
Keeping a stiff upper lip during an emotional event can impair your memory, research suggests.

Those who battled to hide their emotions paid a cognitive price and were less able to recall the upsetting episode than others, a study found.

The work described in New Scientist involved more than 200 volunteers.

James Gross, Stanford University, and Jane Richards, the University of Texas at Austin, published their study in the Journal of Research and Personality. (full story)

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To me, this is just another small piece to a much larger case for raising more gender-androgenous children, and I don't mean in the biological sense. We should all be able to access our emotions with relative ease, but many boys are still raised to shut them off. On the other end, sometimes being to put your emtions aside temporarily can help to function in a given situation in life, such as work or school. If someone is overly affected by emotion, they might not be able to function when they need to. I think there is a healthy balance somewhere in the middle.

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