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Women have long claimed their monthly period makes them more irritable or stressed.Now, however, scientists have said the idea that a woman’s menstrual cycle affects her thinking is nothing more than a myth.
According to some previous studies, women are more impulsive and moody before their period, and more ‘rational’ afterwards. But the latest research says that while women may feel their thinking became altered, this was not the case when studied scientifically. It seems that despite hormone levels fluctuating enormously in a woman’s body, they have no effect on her ability to remember or make decisions. The findings suggest that the cause of the problems may actually lie elsewhere.
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Professor Brigitte Leeners and her team examined three aspects of mental abilities over two menstrual cycles.They concluded that the levels of the hormones oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone had no impact on working memory, which is the ability to remember facts while completing a task. Nor did it have any effect on cognitive bias, the likelihood that thinking would be skewed one way or another. And women were just as able to pay attention to two things at once, the researchers found.The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioural
