The brains of men and women respond significantly differently when watching a movie with scenes of violent content. This is stated by a group of researchers from the Complutense University, the Carlos II University and the University of Oviedo after analyzing the brain activity of a group of young people using electroencephalography (EGG) while they watched violent scenes from a movie that none of them had seen. before.
During their experiment, they found that both men and women activated areas of the brain related to emotional processes and the group of women, in addition, presented more intense brain activity than men in areas related to attentional processes and in those linked to the processing of information. shapes, figures and colors, that is, with visual-spatial aspects.
The researchers’ conclusion is that the men were carried away only by the emotional content of the sequence while the women focused on those emotional aspects but also paid attention to other details, such as space, shapes and colors.
Pablo Revuelta, from the University of Oviedo and one of the authors of the experiment, explains that this study does not allow us to determine the cause of this difference, in which different factors such as genetic or gender socialization can be combined, but it does “give us allows us to better understand how we watch audiovisual films” and the differences and similarities in the interpretations made of these contents.
In this sense, the authors of the work consider that their findings can contribute to improving the creative decisions of filmmakers before or during the production process of a film.
For the experiment, a scene with violent content from the film Perderlo Todo (2021) was projected, an independent film that none of the university students who participated in the study had seen before, 16 women and 14 men aged between 18 and 20 years old.
Researchers Víctor Cerdán Martínez, Pilar López Segura and Tomás Ortiz Alonso, from the Complutense University, participated in the study; María José Lucía Mulas, from the Carlos III University, and Pablo Revuelta Sanz, from the University of Oviedo.
