Columbia University. Under the same given periods of time and under the same conditions, it was found that the average man lost his temper six times to the average woman's three. Studies conducted at Colgate University showed that women have more aplomb than men, that they are less easily flustered and embarrassed, and that they retain this self-possession longer under adverse conditions.
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In the nineteenth century, women very frequently responded to psychological shocks by swooning. The swoon served many functions: It drew attention to a lady much in need of attention; it elicited concern for her which she otherwise frequently failed to receive; and while recovering she might often secure concessions from her "superior" mate which might not, under other circumstance, be forthcoming. In other words, a capacity for swooning in the nineteenth-century female was a positive accomplishment of considerable value, a constructive use of emotion or simulated emotion that the bewildered male never really quite fathomed, for he always considered it a mark of inferiority in women. Weeping often served a similar purpose; as a contemporary wit remarked, a woman's idea of a good cry was one that secured the desired results.
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Under conditions of shock men kept a stiff upper lip, and that was supposed to be the long and the short of it. After all, women were the emotional creatures. Though nineteenth-century statistics are not always reliable, they indicate that there were many mental homes, and most of them seem to have been populated largely by males. For the twentieth century, the statistics are far more accurate.
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Boys as behavior problems far outnumber girls. In one study covering ten cities, the ratio of boys to girls in the problem group was four to one. 7 Some of the types of undesirable behavior reported as occurring much more frequently in boys than in girls were truancy, destruction of property, stealing, profanity, disobedience, defiance, cruelty, bullying, and rudeness. And what is even more significant, a larger number of undesirable behavior manifestations per child were reported for boys than for girls. Boys are much less in control than girls.
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An investigation of 579 nursery school children revealed that, among those from two to four years of age, boys more often grab toys, attack others, rush into danger, refuse to comply,
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