According to psychodynamic theories, females and males develop different personality structures as a result of early-childhood experiences with their caretakers and identification with the same-sex parent. Freud’s theory of personality development is called "psychosexual development." The theory discusses the oral, anal, and phallic stage. Girls get penis envy and boys get a castration complex. Helene Deutsch p

Cognitive psychologists are interested in the ways in which people organize and understand their perceptions of physical and social reality and how these perceptions change at different developmental stages. The social learning theory holds that we learn both "female" and "male" behavior by observing others. However, the behavior we perform is a function of whether it is rewarded or punished. Sandra Bem proposes a “gender schema theory," which attempts to incorporate cognitive, childrearing, and cultural factors in explaining the development of gender identity and roles. Basically, children see things in the world and categorize them as male or female and act accordingly. Alice Eagly explains gender-typed behaviors as compliance to gender-role expectations. Candace West and Don Zimmerman conceive gender as something we do, not as something we are, and that each of us does gender through our dress, speech, behavior, and interactions with others.

Margaret Mead studied adolescent girls in American Samoa, and concluded that adolescence was a very relaxed, comfortable period of life in that society. She argued that it was the socialization of human development that shaped its form, rather than any biologically determined universals. She compared several other South Pacific societies with her own and discovered that what we think of as "feminine" and "masculine" are culturally determined traits, not inherent in biological difference.

Research suggests that men have more difficulty dealing with the loss of their spouse than women. This may be because women are more effective in maintaining social networks. Both men and women tend to become more androgynous in the later years.

roposed that the triad of passivity, masochism, and narcissism is a natural concomitant of female biology. She suggests

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