Beyond Sex and gender: advancing a biosocial understanding of affective processes.

Affective processes such as stress and emotion are at the heart of how we understand ourselves and interact with the world around us. Human and animal research supports the role of sex and gender-related factors in affective processes; however, the neurobiological mechanisms that influence affective processing remain unknown. While sex and gender are traditionally defined, respectively and separately, as biological and social dimensions of a person, alternative approaches rooted in interdisciplinary research rather conceptualize our biologies as inseparable from our social experiences. The proposed program of research aims to explore how an interdisciplinary gender/sex approach (as opposed to the distinct gender and sex approach) influence the neurobehavioural processes of stress and emotion. This research will expand our understanding of how context shapes biological and subjective experiences of stress and emotion and advance the development of integrated theories that will shape the future of gender/sex research.