Biological sex, sex role orientation, masculine sex role stress, dissimulation and self-reported fears

Abstract

Given meta-analytic findings showing females to be generally more fearful than males on multi-dimensional self-report measures of fear, an empirical attempt was made to examine whether this outcome could be explained by psychological factors such as sex role orientation and masculine sex role stress. In addition, the bearing of dissimulation tendencies on findings relating self-reported fears to biological sex, sex roles, and masculine sex role stress was also addressed. Using a non-clinical sample of volunteers from Britain, it was observed with simple correlational analyses that females were more fearful than males on Social, Agoraphobic, Harmless animals and Sexual and aggressive scenes fears, even after holding constant the combined influences of Masculinity and Masculine sex role stress. The sex difference in Bodily injury, death and illness fears emerged only after adjusting for the joint influences of Masculinity and Masculine sex role stress. Applying hierarchical multiple regression analysis with interaction terms, it was found that (a) Biological sex contributed significantly in increasing the proportion of variance accounted for in scores on Social, Agoraphobic, Harmless animals and Sexual and aggressive scenes fears, after accounting for the joint influences of Masculinity (M), Femininity (F), Masculine sex role stress (MGRS), Dissimulation (Lie) and other potentially confounding factors; (b) following the simultaneous adjustment for the influences of the same set of potentially confounding factors (thus including M, F, MGRS, and Lie scores), Biological sex emerged as a consistent predictor of all five types of fears considered, with, as hypothesized, being female predicting high fear scores; (c) the same applied to the predictive ability of Masculine sex role stress (with Biological sex now included as a covariate), with, as predicted, higher stress being predictive of higher fear levels; (d) again, taking into account potentially confounding factors, Masculinity predicted all types of fears considered, except Fears of sexual and aggressive scenes, with, as anticipated, high Masculinity predicting low levels of fear, whereas, contrary to expectations, Femininity and Dissimulation did not succeed in predicting fear scores of any type; (e) few combinations of independent variables (involving Biological sex, M, F, MGRS and Lie) predicted fear scores significantly following adjustment for potential confounds, the significant predictors being MGRS × Biological sex (in relation to Social fears), Lie × Biological sex (Fears of bodily injury, death and illness) and M × F (Harmless animals fears) with respective βs of −.14, .17 and .22 (.01 ⩽ P ⩽ .05); (f) while Biological sex, Masculinity and Masculine sex role stress were all factors predicting the magnitude of self-reported fears, their relative contributions varied according to the fear dimension. Five major hypotheses about the relationship between sex roles and mental and physical health have been advanced in the literature: the traditional hypothesis, the balance theory of androgyny, the main effects androgyny hypothesis, the emergent properties theory of androgyny, and the Masculinity hypothesis (cf. K. Davidson-Katz (1991). Gender roles and health. In C. R. Snyder & D. R. Forsyth (Eds.), Handbook of Social and Clinical Psychology: The Health Perspective. New York: Pergamon). The present findings supported only the Masculinity theory across four out of five fear dimensions (all but the Sexual and aggressive scenes component). The implications of the findings and suggestions for new research directions are discussed.