April 2012 Masculinity increases pain threshold, study reveals

A study by Leeds Metropolitan University researchers, examining the relationship between gender role and pain responses in healthy people, has revealed that those who consider themselves more masculine are less sensitive to pain than those of average masculinity or high femininity.

The study, published in the European Journal of Pain and led by Dr Osama Tashani and PhD student Oras Alabas, evaluated existing experimental studies published between 1950 and 2011, relating a persons gender role and their pain responses to tests such as pressure pain and electric shocks. Gender role is defined in the study as the culturally and socially constructed meanings that describe how women and men should behave in certain situations according to feminine and masculine roles learned throughout life.

The research team, also including Professor Mark Johnson, is based at the Universitys Institute for Health and Wellbeing, reported that there is strong evidence to suggest that several painful conditions are more common in women than men including migraine, tension headaches, fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome. Additionally, women report clinical pain as being more intense and with a greater frequency. These sex and gender differences in pain sensitivity response may be due to factors such as blood pressure, hormones and body size but psychological factors including the social gender role were found to affect response to pain. Dr Tashani commented: Our findings support claims that learned masculinity encourages stoicism and encourages displays of withstanding pain. We

found that femininity was associated with greater sensitivity to painful stimuli

and this may be one of the factors contributing to a greater proportion of women rating their pain more severely than men. This work builds on the teams extensive research into gender and pain, which is currently examining the different responses to pain in women according to stages in their menstrual cycle and comparisons between the developed world and the developing world of the presence of chronic pain in the population, focusing on Libyans and white British healthy volunteers.

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For further details please contact Carrie Braithwaite in the Communications team at Leeds Met on 0113 812 3022 or email c.braithwaite@leedsmet.ac.uk

Notes for editors: Leeds Metropolitan University has over 25,000 students and around 3,000 staff. The Vice Chancellor of Leeds Metropolitan University is Professor Susan Price and the Chair of the Board is Lord Woolmer of Leeds. Leeds Metropolitans four faculties are: Arts, Environment and Technology, Business & Law, Health and Social Sciences, and Carnegie. Leeds Metropolitans heritage can be traced back to the founding of the Mechanics Institute in Leeds in 1824. International students rated the University top in the UK for language support, accommodation quality and learning spaces in the 2010 Autumn Wave of the International Student Barometer and sixth in the world for the quality of its lectures. We have over 1,500 international students from 122 countries around the globe. The Universitys award-winning learning environments include

Broadcasting Place, which was voted the best tall building in the world

in 2010 by the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) and also winner of the 2010 Leeds Architecture Awards New Building category.