Evolutionary Psychology and Gender Development

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sORv1odSyQ

Review:

• What is gender?

• Evolutionary speaking, why is this?

• What is natural selection?

What determines biological sex?

Prenatal development

• 4th and 5th prenatal month– Male’s greater testosterone and female’s ovarian

hormones impact brain wiring

• Brain Modules• http://www.learner.org/resources/series142.html

?pop=yes&pid=1571#

Gender Development and Social Influence

• Research linked to male/female differences in brain areas with abundant sex hormone receptors during development– Ex: adulthood: frontal lobes involved in verbal

fluency are thicker in ___________ and part of parietal cortex involved in space perception is thicker in ______________

Gender roles in development

• Biopsychosocial approach– gender is a social construct

• Culture shapes our roles– Role is a cluster of prescribed actions

So what is a gender role?

• Our expectations about the way men and women behave

What gender roles do you see?

How did we get here?

• Hunter/gatherers– Little division of

labor by sex– Boys and girls

receive same or different upbringing?

Agricultural Societies

• Women stayed close to home

• Men often roam more freely

Conclusions?• Over time, societies typically socialize

children into more distinct gender roles

Social learning theory

• Assumes that children are gender linked by OBSERVING and IMITATING significant others – Rewarded and punished – What does the

father say to his son who was in a fight? What does the father say to his daughter who was in a fight?

• Society assigns each of us to a category of male and female– Gender identity: sense of being male or female– Gender typed: acquiring a traditional male or female role– Gender schema: What it MEANS to be male or female

• Humans adjust their behavior accordingly

• Princess Boy• http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/princess-boy-tran

sgender-kids-primetime-nightline-14425305

• Sexual Identity Goes Awry• http://phptube.hutchcc.edu/videos/1099/sexual-identity-g

oes-awry