NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women and men use different parts of their brains to commit emotional events to memory, the results of a new study suggest.

The study also found that women are better than men at recalling emotion-tinged images, according to the report published in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To discover how gender affects the way people store emotional memories, researchers from Stanford University in California scanned the brains of 12 men and 12 women.

While in the scanner, each study participant looked at a series of 96 images, the content of which ranged from dull to intensely emotional.

Included in the group of emotional images were photos of an autopsy, a mutilated body, angry people and cemeteries, Turhan Canli, now an assistant professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, told Reuters Health in an interview.

The men and women were also asked to rate on a scale of zero to three how "emotionally intense" the image was.

Three weeks later, the study participants came back to the lab and viewed the same 96 images along with 48 new ones. Then the researchers asked the men and women to note whether any of the 144 images were familiar to them.

Men and women remembered dull pictures equally well. But when it came to emotion-charged images, women were more likely than men to remember, the investigators found.

First the researchers looked at which brain areas were active when a person viewed an image that gave rise to an intensely emotional reaction. In both men and women, several areas of the brain, including the left side of the amygdala--a small almond-shaped brain structure known to be involved in fear and emotional response--lit up.

Then Canli and his colleagues looked to see which areas of the brain were involved in committing an image to memory. Here the men and women differed, Canli said. In women, the left side of the amygdala again shone bright on the scans. But in men, it was the right side.

"My hunch is that the psychological processes that have to do with making an emotional evaluation after looking at the picture and recollecting it may be different in women than in men," Canli said. "We noticed that many activated sites were in the left side of the brain in women. The left side of the brain is associated with language use. The women subjects could have talked to themselves about what the story was behind the pictures."

SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2002;10.1073/pnas162356599.

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