Sex differences in brain and personality correlates of the ability to identify popular word associations

The ability of men to identify popular word associations had earlier been shown to be affected by left-sided thalamic surgery for movement disorders; now, over a year later, the impairment has been observed with operations on both sides. In addition, upon testing at approximately the same time interval, men who had undergone temporal lobe surgery for epilepsy have also shown the impairment. In contrast, women have improved after the operations. The Word Association Test (WAT) requires a subject to identify popular word associations to 54 words. In a large group of unoperated subjects, the errors on the WAT were greater for men than for women, although the men scored higher on the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale (WB). WAT scores were found to correlate with scores on the WB and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and the WAT scores of the men tended to show a higher correlation with these measures than did those of the women.