“the findings suggest that, when watching videos that induce an emotional response, men often have more intense emotional experiences*, whereas* women have higher emotional expressivity*, particularly for* negative emotions. In addition, gender differences depend on the specific emotion type but not the valence.”

I read the above study on Pubmed, but you can also read the full article here. The key takeaway is that although women express emotions more, men actually experience emotions more.

This alone was a revelation to me. It explains why men need to be stoic in order to constructively deal with the storm that rages inside. But also how women can bounce all over the place emotionally, going from happy to sad to angry in a matter of minutes. Simply put, a man’s emotions are like a deep ocean. Calm and still for the most part, but when the storm does hit, its waves can tower over even the largest ships. Conversely, a woman is like the surf on a coral reef. Roaring, crashing and foaming, their emotions are on full display. But ultimately, they run less deep than a man’s emotions and they come and go with the wind (and tidal forces, if you know what I mean).

It also explains why women need men to make them “feel” things. Just like a psychopath needs more stimulation to feel something than a neurotypical, a woman needs to feel the depth of a man’s emotions to “feel alive”. Hence, the tendency for women to create drama when a relationship is going too smoothly. My current LTR refers to the time I got “really angry” as the best sex we ever had. I was about ready to walk out.

As a man, it’s crucial to understand these differences. Think back to your earliest blue-pill times whenever your girl threw a fit. Myself at least, I would try to empathize with her from my own perspective. If I were to express my emotions like she was, the intensity of what she was feeling must have been unbearable. What I failed to understand is that compared to most men, women "overplay" their emotions like William Shatner. Let’s take anger as an example. A woman could be feeling angry at a scale of 6 out of 10. But because she is more emotionally expressive, she acts it out in ways we would barely even consider at 8 out of 10, eg. throwing shit, screaming, tearing the house down, etc. Whereas the emotion she feels is one of slight iration, we thus perceive it as a full-on meltdown.

Now we can argue why women have evolved/socialized to be more expressive of especially negative emotions. RP-logic would probably have something along the lines of “in order to extract maximum sympathy and commitment from men, both emotionally and in terms of resources”. Feminists would probably either silence, discredit or protest the whole research altogether. In my opinion, this is all irrelevant.

What is key is to be aware of the discrepancy between your emotional experience and her emotional expressivity. Think of this post the next time she acts like the world is ending when you leave the toilet seat up. What she feels vs. what she expresses is different. Do note that women also generally score higher on neuroticism, so that combined with her higher emotional expressivity and hormonal cycle explains why she constantly seems to be losing her shit over the smallest of things.

TL:DR look past a woman's emotional expressivity and realize that her underlying feelings are often a lot weaker than they seem. React accordingly. A good measure of thumb is to mentally downgrade her emotions by one scale. If you think anger, annoyance is more likely. If she says she's depressed, your regular ole' sad is often closer to the truth. Nuclear meltdown? Either someone abducted her only child, or she's manipulating you. Just knowing this helps you both accurately assess a girls emotions, as well as avoid being a tool and used as such.