Diane Ruble

Who they are

Ruble is listed as D. N. Ruble on the 1977 paper. Her later papers on children's gender development list New York University as her affiliation.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Premenstrual symptoms: a reinterpretation (1977). Ruble's starting point was that most evidence about premenstrual symptoms came from self-report questionnaires, which can be biased by what women expect to feel. To test this, the study separated women's perception of their cycle phase from their actual cycle phase. Some women were led to believe that they were premenstrual and others that they were between periods. Those who believed they were premenstrual reported significantly more of several physical symptoms, such as water retention, than those who believed they were between periods. The paper concluded that, because of these psychosocial influences on symptom reports, earlier conclusions about the size of menstrual changes and about their physiological basis needed to be re-examined.

Key ideas

The study is a clean example of expectation shaping symptom report. It does not show that premenstrual symptoms are imaginary, and it did not test what happens to the body. It shows that a questionnaire about symptoms partly measures belief, which matters for any field that relies on women describing how they feel.

The result sits alongside later work pointing in different directions. A 1998 study at the US National Institute of Mental Health found that women with premenstrual syndrome have an abnormal response to normal hormonal changes, and a 2013 Canadian study of daily mood found that stress, physical health and social support predicted mood much better than cycle phase.

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