Thursday, 19 June 2014
Stress Triggers Depression in Women, Alcohol Craving in Men
By RICK NAUERT PHD Senior News Editor
An
interesting new study finds that women and men tend to have different types of
stress-related psychological disorders.
Women have greater rates of depressionand some types of anxiety disorders than men, while men
have greater rates of alcohol-use disorders than women.
In the study of emotional and alcohol-craving
responses to stress, scientists discovered that when men become upset, they are
more likely than women to want alcohol.
Results will be published in the July issue of Alcoholism:
Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at
OnlineEarly.
“We know that women and men respond to stress
differently,” said Tara M. Chaplin, associate research scientist at Yale
University School of Medicine and first author of the study.
“For example, following a stressful
experience, women are more likely than men to say that they feel sad or
anxious, which may lead to risk for depression and anxiety disorders. Some
studies have found that men are more likely to drink alcohol following stress
than women. If this becomes a pattern, it could lead to alcohol-use disorders.”
As part of a larger study, the researchers
exposed 54 healthy adult social drinkers (27 women, 27 men) to three types of
imagery scripts – stressful, alcohol-related, and neutral/relaxing – in
separate sessions, on separate days and in random order. Chaplin and her
colleagues then assessed participants’ subjective emotions, behavioral/bodily
responses, cardiovascular arousal as indicated by heart rate and blood
pressure, and self-reported alcohol craving.
“After listening to the stressful story, women
reported more sadness and anxiety than men,” said Chaplin, “as well as greater
behavioral arousal. But, for the men … emotional arousal was linked to
increases in alcohol craving. In other words, when men are upset, they are more
likely to want alcohol.”
These findings – in addition to the fact that
the men drank more than the women on average – meant that the men had more
experience with alcohol, perhaps leading them to turn to alcohol as a way of
coping with distress, added Chaplin.
“Men’s tendency to crave alcohol when upset
may be a learned behavior or may be related to known gender differences in
reward pathways in the brain,” she said. “And this tendency may contribute to
risk for alcohol-use disorders.”
There is a greater societal acceptance of
“emotionality,” particularly sadness and anxiety, in women than in men, noted
Chaplin.
“Women are more likely than men to focus on
negative emotional aspects of stressful circumstances, for example, they tend
to ‘ruminate’ or think over and over again about their negative emotional
state,” she said.
“Men, in contrast, are more likely to distract
themselves from negative emotions, to try not to think about these emotions.
Our finding that men had greater blood pressure response to stress, but did not
report greater sadness and anxiety, may reflect that they are more likely to
try to distract themselves from their physiological arousal, possibly through
the use of alcohol.”
Source: Yale University
