Emotional reactivity to social-evaluative stress: gender differences 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 skin resistance level), and task performance (cognitive and motor) were recorded. There was low, but theoretically meaningful, concordance across response systems: significant relationships appeared among measures of cognitive aspects, and among those concerned with somatic aspects, but not between these two areas. Furthermore, concordance was higher in females than in 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). These differences in concordance as a function of gender are explained in terms of emotional response suppression or masking in males. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.