Emotional reactivity to social-evaluative stress: genderdifferences in response systems concordance

Under social-evaluative stress, self-reported anxiety (cognitive and somatic),behavioural anxiety (motor, facial, verbal and social), physiological arousal (heart rate and skinresistance level), and task performance (cognitive and motor) were recorded. There was low, buttheoretically meaningful, concordance across response systems: significant relationshipsappeared among measures of cognitive aspects, and among those concerned with somaticaspects, but not between these two areas. Furthermore, concordance was higher in females thanin males specifically between the two response systems that can be voluntarily controlled (i.e.,self-report and behaviour) and the noncontrollable system (i.e., physiological arousal). Thesedifferences in concordance as a function of gender are explained in terms of emotional responsesuppression or masking in males.