Sorry doc, but emotional repression is higher in men because the culture demands it of them, but that's not the same thing as emotional regulation. You don't even need studies to tell you that - just look around at the society. Who are the vast majority of the hot-heads, yellers, bullies, bar-fight instigators, office tyrants? Men!
When you repress (rather than regulate) your emotions, you are inevitably run by them out of your subconscious mind. We all do this to some extent, but because it's demanded of men to repress emotions (and they aren't taught how to regulate them instead), they are the ones most often seen to be behaving almost entirely out of unintegrated emotions..
And this sort of faux stoicism is well documented to be extremely detrimental to men's health and well-being. It's the opposite of high EQ.
I suggest you actually know what you're talking about next time you leave a snarky comment, because this is clearly not your area of expertise. This sort of faux stoicism is considered to be a harmful part of masculine norms. If you knew anything about this topic, you’d already know that.
APA’s new Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Boys and Men strive to recognize and address these problems in boys and men while remaining sensitive to the field’s androcentric past. Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.
Stoicism is a trait that has traditionally been associated with masculinity. It describes the tendency to be unaffected by challenges and to suppress or control emotions.
A 2008 study looked into the relationship between stoicism and mental health. It found that while stoicism is not only found among men, men were significantly more likely to express stoicism than women. Stoicism was also linked to lower overall well-being and may also be associated with interpersonal difficulties.
‘In Australia, the cultural paradigm is of the stoic farmer who works the land and never complains, cuts his hand with a chainsaw and just wraps it up and keeps working. It’s very much a “get on with it” sort of masculine ideal,’ he told newsGP. ‘But the downside is that those men, in times of emotional difficulty, haven’t got the ability or even the words to think through their emotional problems.’
Dr Antoniadis believes men’s efforts to conform to such cultural ideals often leads to an inability to even recognise their feelings in the first place.
‘In order to not show your emotions, it’s more effective if you can deny them, even to yourself,’ he said. ‘As a result, you get men who can’t speak or think about their emotions – instead, they feel unwell or that something is not right.
‘If you try to tease out the problem, they can’t put their finger on it; often they’ll point to symptoms, which might be drinking or acting out violently or something like that, but they can’t say what underlies those sorts of acting out.’
