dying from a broken heart

It's always the end of a beautiful story, a powerful love affair. The old and grey couple, together for decades, yearly celebrations of their affirmations and vows, marching through traditional gifts: coral, ruby, sapphires, gold. Surrounded by a field of family, generations stemming out from their love, she passes on, peacefully in the night, and he follows a few days later, his will to live gone without her. The perfect end to the perfect story.

Like most perfect stories, we dismiss it as fantasy. Fewer people these days stay married so long, have so many kids, have so much happiness. And of course, the myth of dying from a broken heart is just that: a myth.

Except, in "news I didn't really want to hear", a study by the Case Business School in London have found people really do die from broken hearts. Men are six times more likely to die in the year after their partner's death, while women are twice as likely to die in that same time. This study is different than those which have come before; a n older study in the American Journal of Public Health shows men more likely to die after their wife, but more from life issues (malnutrition, etc) than grief, while a different Johns Hopkins study published just before Valentine's Day 2005 shows that a rapid increase of stress hormones in highly emotional situations can essentially stun the heart and mimic a heart attack. Instead, this new study, sponsored by the Actuarial Profession, statistically proves people can die of a broken heart in the early stages of bereavement.

Thankfully, there is a bit of positive in this cloud of gloomy news: if the widow or widower survives the first year of mourning, the chances of dying (at least from the broken heart - ie, no clear medical reasons) decrease.

Now the question is: why are men more susceptible to dying from a broken heart, while women are more likely to suffer from immediate emotional shock, and how do we minimize both?
-Kelly

On Sex-Segregated Schooling

NYT has an in-depth article on
teaching boys and girls separately in school based on proposed differences in everything from artistic preferences to optimal operating temperature.

While I have blogged previously on using scientific input to improve educational methods, I am somewhat skeptical of the extent to which segregation is advocated. A large reason is that while the mean may show a slight differential between the sexes, the spread has significant overlap and we regularly see a healthy number of outliers. I, for example, took a Thundercats lunchbox to school and read all the books in the library on "creepy-crawlies" like ants, spiders, and snakes, and I know I would have been utterly miserable in an all-girls' classroom.

Assuming that these differences are scientifically provable (or non-disprovable) for a majority of the population, we are left with a naturalistic/normative conflict between what is "optimal" now and what we forsee as future needs (such as the need to interact comfortably with males and females).

One thing we can take away from this is that we ought to exercise caution when advocating extreme changes in schooling to avoid backlash effects (as are becoming apparent in the marked decrease of boys' success in school). Also, there is no clear-cut answer on how to improve our education system, but there are many academic disciplines we ought to access in order to enrich the discussion.

Addendum: A few more thoughts on this. First, an important question inherent in any push for change the question must be asked: "Are we running away from something, or running towards something?" In other words, in segregating boys and girls, are we avoiding a harm, or seeking a benefit?

Second, I observe that while girls suffered in school in previous generations due to overly low expectations, the current hypothesis for boys is that they suffer from overly high or unrealistic expectations. I'm sure a gender theorist would have some interesting comments on this.

Third, I have noticed that a majority of problems develop at the interfaces between contrasting systems or paradigms. In this case, it will be when we make a shift from a school system that adapts to the strengths and weaknesses of girls and boys to an adult world where people are expected to adapt to the needs of society ("including a competitive workplace that was designed around men's strengths and is only slowly changing," the feminist in me notes). Assuming that such an education system presents significant benefits, I am concerned with how we will help children make the transition to adulthood.

Why Sex Matters for Neuroethics...

There is a provocative article in the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience today which asks: "Why should we pay special attention to the neuroscience of sex differences? " Authors lay out a plethora of directions in which such research could go, posing such as questions as "How ought we disseminate this information into a sensitive social environment that has a history of bias and discrimination against women? What are the implications of this work for our understandings of what makes us women and men? How should this research be applied in educational, medical, and legal contexts, if at all?... In considering the neuroscience of sex differences, we confront a fundamental issue: how do science and society understand female-male differences, or rather, women and men?"

A little different approach than the previous post we had on Gender: Love it or Kill it?.

The full article can be accessed here, subscription required.

The Human Side, or the Female Side?

Election years are always interesting in their coverage of candidates - and since I'm something of both a news and politics junkie, it's tailor-made news heaven. This year proves to be an especially interesting one with Hilary Clinton's run for the White House, not necessarily because of her politics or even that she's a Clinton, but because she's a woman, and it really lets us see the double standard the media, and perhaps the public, have towards men and women.

As is being reported in quite a lot of places, Clinton won New Hampshire because she emoted - something, her lack of emotion, she has been criticized heavily for in the past. Now this in and of itself is an interesting thing; when is the last time you can remember a male presidential candidate being skewered for his lack of emotions? Most male candidates don't get choked up, don't cry on camera, keep very firmly in control of their emotions - in fact, to this day many people think that Howard Dean's "famous Iowa scream" is what ultimately cost him the Democratic nomination. A showing of too much raw, uncontrolled emotion.

A negative thing in a man.

But in a woman, not showing emotions seems to be a negative trait. We, as a matter of fact, have some rather unflattering terms for women who're viewed as carefully in control of their emotions, from frigid or ice queen and on.

Yet on the flip side, although apparently her teary exchange with New Hampshire voters did Clinton a world of good, her campaign staff was nervous about how it would play. How would people perceive a woman teary and tired, talking about how exhausting campaigning is? The concern was that it would badly undercut her messages of being experienced, that she is strong, that she can handle the demands of the job.

Do men on the campaign trail face similar damned if you do, damned if you don'ts? At the moment, I'm hard pressed to come up with an example that fits, but that also could be because I'm seeing this very clear example for a woman being damned no matter what she does in front of me. What about you - do you think male politicians face these same issues? Or are we really seeing a nasty side of ourselves that we thought that, as a society, we had passed beyond, where in the same situation women are judged against standards and qualities that men are not?

Perhaps most to the point, I think we have to ask ourselves a simple question: if Obama or Edwards had become teary-eyed in front of voters, talking about the same concerns, would Maureen Dowd of the New York Times have written an article entitled "Can Obama/Edwards Cry His Way To the White House"?
-Kelly