Now then, I am off out to dinner tomorrow night with a number of other couples to celebrate the birthday of one of Katie’s closest friends. Katie’s friends are lovely… Boy, can they talk too! They are some of the few people I know that speak as much as I do… Makes for an interesting evening, eh?  

You may well find this hard to believe 😉 … recent studies have shown that women don’t actually talk any more than men do! I am not the exception! You can have a read of this piece of this piece of research at Sage online — it is proof that women do not actually talk more than men… I am guessing the research samples of people were not taken in hairdressers then. Hahaha.

However, there is recent evidence that suggests that they way women remember speech is different to that of men and this is fascinating stuff…

Yes indeed, I have been reading this fascinating piece of research by Richard Ely and Elizabeth Ryan who have looked at people’s personal memories and found that while women may not talk more than men, their recollections do tend to be more speech-filled.

Let me quote:

Sixty female students and 48 male students were asked to write about their earliest memory, an early childhood memory, a learning experience, a recent low point, a recent high point and a self-defining memory.

Their answers showed what an important part speech plays in our memories, with an instance of speech recalled once in every 100 words on average, reflecting about 8 per cent of the participants’ text.

The amount of speech recalled in participants’ memories varied with gender and personality. People who scored highly on measures of openness, agreeableness and/or expressivity all tended to include more examples of speech in their memories. And women were found to recall more speech than men even after controlling for gender differences in personality and other factors.

The researchers surmised that women may recall more speech than men because of differences in the way boys and girls are spoken to by their parents. “Parents are more elaborative and more emotional when conversing with daughters than with sons,” they said.

Another finding to emerge from the study was the tight association between emotion and speech-related memories. The more negative a participant said a memory was, the more likely this memory was to contain speech.

This was consistent with the number of speech-related memories that had obviously had a momentous effect on participants’ lives. Take this example, in which a participant recounted the time he accidentally injured a team-mate in baseball, and went to see if he was okay: “The coach just turns to me and says ‘Get out of here you little bastard, you have done enough.’ I didn’t play baseball for five years after that.”

Hmmmm… So, with our stereotypes shattered, and safe in the knowledge that the genders speak the same amount of time in general, as I glance over the table tomorrow night on one of the rare occasions I am not endlessly blabbering on… I can safely summise that those not speaking, may well be thinking of conversations they had. I had better make sure I say things that are worth remembering then, eh?

Will take my tongue out of my cheek now… Where it has been for todays blogging… Heck, it does not make for good hypnosis sessions for my clients with it there…