ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews social behaviors, personality characteristics, communication styles, and cognitive abilities of females and males. Aggression is behavior that is intended to hurt someone, either physically or verbally. Prosocial behavior is voluntary behavior intended to benefit someone else. Narcissism is a need for admiration and a relative lack of empathy. The chapter explores the different types of communication styles of women and men: verbal communication and nonverbal communication. Verbal abilities include a variety of language skills such as vocabulary, reading comprehension, writing, spelling, grammar, and word fluency. Visual–spatial skills are used extensively in engineering, architecture, surgery, and navigation and in everyday activities such as doing jigsaw puzzles or reading maps. The chapter examines some of the factors associated with women's math performance. Early studies of gender differences in mathematics performance found that girls and boys did equally well at understanding mathematical concepts at all ages but that boys did better than girls in problem solving.
