Brain may play key role in gender, crime gap

There's a reason that men and women don't understand each other -- their brains are different, at least according to Psychology Professor Ruben Gur.

Gur spoke yesterday to a small group of faculty, researchers and students, and his talk, entitled "Why do men fight while women can (usually) talk things over?" aimed to explain the large gap between male and female criminal offenders.

The gap is especially wide in aggressive crimes, where the ratio is approximately 10,000 men to one woman, and as Gur said, "There is no category [of crime] where the sexes are equal."

No other population groupings -- including socioeconomic level and educational background -- have shown such a stark contrast.

Gur's talk addressed one possible source for these differences: the brain.

Gur first stumbled across the phenomenon in the Brain Behavior Laboratory, which he heads. During a study, his research team tested hundreds of men and women on a battery of neuropsychological tests, gauging factors like mental flexibility and verbal and spatial memory. They also performed brain neuroimaging studies, which show how various tasks cause different parts of the brain to activate.

And while the study was complicated, the results were quite obvious, showing consistent differences between the performances of men and women. Men, for example, scored almost twice as well on tests of spatial memory, while women far outperformed men on verbal memory.

Women, on average, have proportionally larger frontal cortexes, which means they have more control over their behavior. Moreover, that part of the brain is located right next to the area that controls language. In other words, the average female brain is much more efficiently designed to deal with emotion through words than their male counterparts.

Gur and his colleagues first published their results to a swirl of controversy -- so controversial, in fact, that one reviewer commented that while he believed the results, he still didn't want to publish them.

The fear is that the results imply "that there are some biological differences between men and women," Gur said, "and this would justify discrimination."

However, audience members seemed unconcerned with that ramification.

"More and more, there is an emerging consensus that there are biological and environmental causes" for behavior, said Chris Koper, a research associate in the Jerry Lee Center for Criminology.

The event was sponsored by the Jerry Lee Criminology Colloquium.

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