Through an innovative analysis of audio recordings of plenary speeches, Dietrich, Hayes, and O'Brien (2019) find that women in the U.S. House of Representatives speak with greater emotional intensity about women than other issues. With vocal pitch as a new measure of personal issue commitment, the finding suggests that women legislators' efforts to work on behalf of women result from intrinsic motivation. I ask whether the same is true in an alternative parliamentary setting, the German Bundestag, where personal preferences play a very different role due to strict party discipline. The answer is yes. Analyzing audio and text data from more than 30,000 speeches in the Bundestag between 2011 and 2020, I find that women in the Bundestag address women more frequently and with greater emotional intensity than men. The results suggest that women legislators are more emotionally invested in women-related issues than men.

Adaptation to the reconstructed past is central to understanding negative emotion and its management, but research is scarce on negative emotion in romantic conflict narratives. Addressing this gap, we studied negative emotion in romantic conflict narratives as a function of gender and associations with self-reports of conflict strategies. In 145 emerging adults (54% women) from the United States, we assessed angry and sad emotion words and vocal pitch (an index of emotional arousal) during romantic conflict narratives, and self-rated anger and sadness immediately following these narratives. Results showed that self-rated anger and sadness were higher for women than men, but the use of angry and sad words and pitch did not differ by gender. For men, pitch and sad words were related to reports of less problem solving and aggression. For women, negative emotion ratings were related to less problem solving and more withdrawal. Our findings suggest that reflecting back on past romantic conflicts is a task that involves the regulation of negative emotions and that such emotions are related to conflict approaches.