Cognitive Task Performance and Anxiety Across Menstrual Phases: Understanding Through the Cross-Gender Identity Lens

Abstract

The study aims to explore the impact of cross gender identity and menstrual cycle phase (luteal and menstrual) on cognitive task performance and anxiety across females aged 18-26 years from northern urban Indian region. The study makes use of three cognitive performance tasks, namely, Spatial Ability Task from the General Ability Test Battery, Stroop Task and Wisconsin Card Sorting Task. State Trait Anxiety Inventory is also utilized to understand anxiety levels across menstrual phases. The study focuses on the differences across menstrual phases (luteal vs menstrual) and cross gender identity scores (low vs high) and how they interact with cognitive task performance and anxiety levels. Findings of the study presents significant difference in all the cognitive tasks across menstrual phases with generally better performance in menstrual phase than luteal. But cross gender identity scored did not present a statistically significant interaction with performance on cognitive tasks across menstrual phases. Anxiety levels also differ across phases of menstrual cycle. However, there is no significant interaction with cross gender identity scores across different menstrual phases. These finding point towards the fact that hormonal variations do play a major role in assessing cognitive performance and helps us understand the emotional state of females. These findings can be helpful in educational and occupational sectors. Further to expand this study with cross gender identity, incorporation of hormonal assays with larger sample can help develop more concrete results as compared to the questionnaire used in this study.