Journal of Personality © 2012,

Sex differences in cognitive abilities and in personality have been the subject of numerous studies and meta-analyses. For cognitive abilities, it was found that men tend to outperform women on tasks assessing the ability to manipulate visual images in working memory, whereas women tend to outper-form men on tasks requiring retrieval from long-term memory and the acquisition and use of verbal information (Halpern, 2000). Altogether, however, sex differences in cognitive abili-ties seem to be small as far as differences in means are con