Ora Strickland is in the business of correcting false assumptions. As Professor of Nursing in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Strickland participated for more than ten years in the Women's Health Initiative, a national study that made headlines with its findings about hormone therapy and other health issues that affect women. The author of the first nursing measurement textbook (soon to be printed in its fourth edition), Strickland is currently exploring two distinct areas of nursing research that long have intrigued her: expectant fathers and the menstrual cycles of women. In the process, she is debunking some cherished myths about pregnancy, love and relationships, and premenstrual syndrome.

Myth #1: Only women get pregnant.

As a nurse working in an obstetrician's office in the 1970s, Strickland noticed that the pregnant women whom she encountered kept complaining that their husbands had symptoms which mirrored their own. "They would say, ‘I'm doing fine, but my husband is a mess,'" Strickland says. Her doctoral dissertation successfully explored this phenomenon, also known as "sympathetic pregnancy" or couvade syndrome; Strickland became the first person in the United States to study it systematically. She found that some men do experience physical and emotional symptoms associated with pregnancy and that these symptoms diminish once their mates have given birth. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Strickland expanded her research by conducting qualitative interviews with 88 expectant fathers; she wanted to learn about their experiences and perceptions of impending fatherhood, of their partners, and of their unborn children.

Myth #2: Having a baby will make your man love you.

Today, Strickland is taking a fresh look at that earlier data. She has quantified her earlier qualitative findings in order to explore the world of expectant fathers across social class, age, parental experience, and other variables. "When you step away for a while and then reexamine the data using different methods, you start seeing new patterns," she says. Among other discoveries, she has found that a man's affection for his unborn child is derivative of the affection he feels for the mother. In interviews, expectant fathers typically said that they loved their unborn child because they loved their wives or partners. Even if the pregnancy was unplanned, or the man felt anxious about fatherhood, those with great affection for their mates retained a similar feeling for the expected child. The flip side of this finding, of course, is that a woman cannot compel a man to love her simply by becoming pregnant. Says Strickland: "A woman cannot force a man to love her by having a baby. He will love the baby because he already loves her. Nor can she force a man to love her by getting pregnant."

Myth #3: If a man really wants to help his pregnant partner, he'll do it.

Good intentions may not be enough when it comes to the amount of time expectant fathers spend participating in their partner's pregnancy. "For men with high-pressure jobs — attorneys, executives, and physicians, among others — becoming very involved in their spouse's or partner's pregnancy is very difficult," Strickland says, drawing from the same set of data. "Education level has little bearing on this outcome. What matters is the type of job the man has." The men she interviewed who held high-stress jobs (and college professors did not fall into this category) reported that the demands of their professional life consistently thwarted their plans to participate in their partner's pregnancy. The lesson? If a pregnant woman is expecting her high-powered husband to share the burden of preparing for a new baby, she needs to realize that he might not be able to do it. Strickland cautions, "He might be able to pay someone else to help her, but he's not in a position to do it himself."

Myth #4: It must be that time of the month.

In a separate study, funded by the NIH, Strickland has explored premenstrual syndrome and brain-wave function in women. In collaboration with one of her Ph.D. students, she has found that women who have PMS (and not all do) exhibit distinct symptom patterns. Some have physical symptoms but no emotional symptoms around the time of their periods. Some have physical and emotional symptoms around the time of their periods. Then there are the complicated cases: women who experience moderate physical symptoms of PMS all month long, which intensify before and during their periods; women who experience moderate emotional symptoms of PMS all month long, which spike before and during their periods; and women who experience emotional and physical symptoms of PMS all month long, which intensify before and during their periods.

Among these more complicated groups, Strickland has found that PMS is not the sole contributor. The group that experienced moderate physical symptoms all month long tended to have chronic physical conditions that had gone undiagnosed – including arthritis and early-stage diabetes. The group that experienced moderate emotional symptoms tended to have latent or subclinical emotional conditions, including depression, anxiety, and early signs of bipolar disorder. The same situation appeared with women who exhibited month-long emotional and physical symptoms. Based on these findings, Strickland argues that the hormonal and other physiological changes caused by the menstrual cycle can take a subclinical disease or condition (one not yet expressed through symptoms) and aggravate that condition, so that it becomes visible. "The stress of the menstrual cycle is making these budding conditions worse," says Strickland, who plans to conduct further research into these connections. Studying menstrual cycle patterns in women who have already been diagnosed with certain diseases could lead to a better understanding of the relation between these patterns and the emergence of a disease in its early stages. "Do women have menstrual cycle patterns that are characteristic of their diseases?" she asks. "That is where my research is heading."

In coming months, Strickland hopes to undertake another study as well. She wants to return to her original area of specialization — expectant fathers — and investigate one of the most misunderstood groups within that category, teenage fathers. "This is a group of young men that we need to understand better," she says. "But getting to interview them requires persuading their mothers first, who often do not want their sons to participate." It's a challenge on any number of levels. But if Strickland's track record is any indicator, chances are pretty good that soon she'll be debunking another set of myths.