American Psychological Association SYMPTOM ACCESSIBILITY

Men are more likely than women to die at virtually every age, but women report greater numbers and frequencies of health problems and physical symptoms (Skelton & Deitchman, 2000). The relative magnitude of the gender difference in symptom-reporting behavior is modest (about 0.4 SDs), but it has attracted much theoretical interest. Recent work showing women’s superiority in accessing autobiographical (Davis, 1999; Seidlitz & Diener, 1998) and self-linked episodic memories (Herlitz, Nilsson, & Backman, 1997) suggests a possible explanation: Perhaps women's memories of past symptom episodes are more readily accessible than are men's. One purpose of this experiment was to measure the speed with which participants respond to a multi-item inventory asking respondents to indicate how often they experience common physical symptoms. If women respond more quickly than men, this might indicate their symptom memories are more accessible. We varied the temporal reference period for symptom reporting to include “the past month ” and “the past year, ” for two reasons. First, people can presumably determine more quickly the frequency with which they have experienced symptoms during the past month than during the past year; if this is so, it helps corroborate that response latency can be reasonably interpreted in terms of accessibility. Second, the reference period manipulation provided an opportunity to look at how respondents construe the meaning of symptom-reporting tasks. Winkielman, Knäuper, and Schwarz (1998) have shown that people's construal of anger frequency measures depends on the temporal reference period for the measures. When asked, How often have you been angry during the past week? Winkielman et al.’s respondents believe