Males are often not as immediately adept as many females in putting their emotions into words. One reason is, potentially, the lower number of what are called verbal-emotive centers and the lower frequency of verbal-emotive connectivity in male brains. This means that boys tend to work through their feelings in different ways than girls do.
1) Boys tend to need to expel and express emotions physically more than girls do.
They literally use their bodies to physically move through their emotions. Two brain-based reasons for this appear to be the greater amount of blood flow in the male cerebellum (the brain's "doing" center) and a greater amount of spinal fluid in the male brain stem, which may conduct more cellular electricity downward into the male body during stress than in the female.
2) Boys tend to take longer than girls to attach words to feelings.
As we discussed earlier, with verbal centers on both sides of their brain and with more connectivity between those verbal centers, girls and women tend to link words and feelings more quickly and with more verbal complexity than do boys and men, who generally have verbal centers only or mainly on the left side of the brain.
3) Boys tend to rely less on emotional understanding than on logical problem solving in the face of situational stresses.
While all human beings need to move emotional processing in the brain from the raw emotion centers (in the limbic system) to the prefrontal cortex (near the top of the brain) in order to make an executive decision about what to do with emotions, boys' brains appear to be more utilitarian in some profound ways -- the male brain often moves emotions more quickly to the logic and problem-solving areas of the cerebral cortex than the female brain does. Perhaps for this reason, boys may not be as inclined to spend a lot of time talking about how they feel. They may be more likely to try to quickly direct those emotions toward a goal.
4) Boys and men often see emotions and emotional processing as making them weaker because that is how it feels to them.
In large part because of a long history of quashing emotional processing in order to survive -- in other words, show strength and power in order to survive against natural aggressors and human attackers without showing pain -- male DNA may have developed a number of ways to deflect and defend against "unnecessary" weaknesses. Also, in many households and communities, the idea that boys don't cry is so intensely socialized into males from an early age that they may hide emotional vulnerability for reasons of nurture as well.
The above is excerpted from Raising Boys By Design: What the Bible and Brain Science Reveal About What Your Son Needs To Thrive by Gregory L. Jantz, Phd and Michael Gurian. Dr. Jantz is the founder of A Place of Hope, The Center For Counseling and Health Resources in Edmonds, Washington.