Boys Are Not As Emotional As Girls, Here's Why!

Girls are more emotional than boys. Ever wondered why? Well, it is because of structural differences in the brain of some boys. Callous and unemotional boys have a different structure in that region of their brain which is linked to conscience and empathy. Researchers from University of Basel and the University Of Basel Psychiatric Hospital, Switzerland, studied 189 adolescents for brain development. In the past years, researchers have laid more focus on such personality traits to because they are linked to the development of a serious antisocial behavior.

Till now, most research in this field have laid focus on understanding such unemotional and callous behavior in people diagnosed with psychiatric conditions, conduct disorder in particular. Therefore, it was not clear if the link between a callous-unemotional behavior and the brain structure were only in people diagnosed with too much aggression or was it the antisocial behavior and aggression which could explain the brain differences.

Researches then made an effort to look closely at the brain development of teens with a magnetic resonance imaging to check if such behavior is linked to a different brain structure or not. They were particularly interested in checking if the link between unemotional behavior and differences in brain structure were different between boys and girls or not.

Results showed that typically-growing boys who had more of unemotional and callous traits had a larger volume of anterior insula, a brain region implicated for understanding empathy and others' emotions. This was seen only in boys and not in girls, even if they had the same traits.

"Our findings demonstrate that callous-unemotional traits are related to differences in brain structure in typically- developing boys without a clinical diagnosis," said Nora Maria Raschle from the University of Basel.

"In a next step, we want to find out what kind of trigger leads some of these children to develop mental health problems later in life while others never develop problems," said Raschle.