Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Seligman Martin E

Author:Seligman, Martin E. [Seligman, Martin E.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307803344
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

Girls vs. Boys

THE DISASTROUS long-term effects of divorce and fighting were not the only data that surprised us. We had been very interested in sex differences. We had strong expectations about which sex should be more depressed and pessimistic, but when we looked at our data, we found the opposite—over and over again.

As you know from chapters four and five, adult women are much more depressed on average than men. Twice as many women are found to suffer depression—whether the phenomenon is measured by treatment statistics, by door-to-door surveys, or by number of symptoms. We supposed that this must begin in childhood and that we would find that girls are more depressed than boys and have a more pessimistic explanatory style.

Not so. At every point in our study, the boys are more depressed than the girls. The average boy will have many more depressive symptoms and suffer more severe depression than the average girl. Among the boys in the third and fourth grades, a whopping 35 percent are found to be severely depressed at least once in the third and fourth grades. Among the girls only 21 percent showed severe depression. The difference is confined to two sets of symptoms: The boys show more behavioral disturbance (e.g., “I get in trouble all the time”) and more anhedonia (lack of enjoyment, not enough friends, social withdrawal). In sadness, diminished self-esteem, and bodily symptoms, the boys do not exceed the girls.

The explanatory-style differences are parallel. To our surprise, the girls are more optimistic than the boys, at each measuring. They are more optimistic than the boys about good events and less pessimistic about bad ones.

So the Princeton-Penn Longitudinal Study yielded another surprise. Boys are more pessimistic and more depressed than girls, and boys are more fragile in their response to bad events, including divorce. This means that whatever causes the huge difference in depression in adulthood, with women twice as vulnerable as men, it does not have its roots in childhood. Something must happen at or shortly after puberty that causes a flip-flop —and hits girls very hard indeed. We can only guess what this might be. But the children we are following are just approaching puberty now, so in its last year the Princeton-Penn Longitudinal Study may tell us what happens around puberty that shifts the burden of depression from males to females.

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