
Justin M CarréNipissing University · Department of Psychology
Justin M Carré
Ph.D.
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114
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
August 2013 - present
Publications
Publications (114)
The sexual misperception bias is a cognitive bias in which men tend to overestimate sexual interest from women, potentially shaped by evolutionary mating strategies. Testosterone, often linked to mating behaviors, might play a role in sustaining sexual overperceptions. To explore this possibility, we conducted a placebo-controlled study with 190 he...
Past research has found that sexualized women are often dehumanized (i.e., attributed reduced human qualities).However, the mechanisms contributing to such dehumanization remain poorly understood. In this pre-registered experiment involving a within-subject, placebo-controlled, cross-over design, we tested whether testosterone contributes to men’s...
Objective
Decades of research suggest a small, but significant positive association between testosterone (T) and measures of aggression and mating psychology/behavior. More recently, researchers have developed single-dose pharmacological challenge paradigms to test the causal role of T in modulating such processes.
Methods
We summarize and synthes...
Recent policies banning or limiting the participation of transgender and intersex women from the women's category of sport have called upon the science of testosterone to justify exclusion and define eligibility criteria. Scientific evidence supports a male advantage in sport, substantial sex differences in circulating testosterone, permanent effec...
This paper examines the potential effects of testosterone and personality traits on the decision to evade taxes. In a series of experiments, subjects completed behavioural tasks and made a one-shot tax evasion decision. We estimate a negative weakly significant treatment effect, which suggests that an exogenous increase in the testosterone level ma...
Research has linked hormones to behavioral outcomes in intricate ways, often moderated by psychological dispositions. The associations between testosterone and antisocial or prosocial outcomes also depend on dis-positions relevant to status and dominance. In two studies (N1 = 68, N2 = 83), we investigated whether endogenous testosterone, measured i...
Objective
The dual-hormone hypothesis (DHH) posits that some effects of testosterone on human behavior and psychology related to status-seeking are moderated by cortisol, such that they are stronger when cortisol levels are low. In support of the DHH, studies have found that cortisol negatively moderated the relationship between testosterone and su...
Attractiveness judgements influence desires to initiate and maintain romantic relationships. Testosterone also predicts relationship initiation and maintenance; such effects may be driven by the hormone's modulation of attractiveness judgements, but no studies have investigated causal (and situation-dependent) effects of the hormone on these judgem...
For over two decades, researchers in the field of human social neuroendocrinology have been using single-dose pharmacological challenge protocols to determine the causal effects of testosterone on psychological, behavioural, and neural processes. Most of these single-dose administration studies have so far used (1) single-sex samples and (2) varyin...
Across the animal kingdom, testosterone levels change rapidly within the context of competitive and/or mating related interactions. It has been speculated that such acute changes in testosterone concentrations may ultimately function to regulate ongoing and future behaviors, such as aggression, competitiveness, mate-seeking, and risk-taking. In thi...
Objective
Hormones are often conceptualized as biological markers of individual differences and have been associated with a variety of behavioral indicators and characteristics, such as mating behavior or acquiring and maintaining dominance. However, before researchers create strong theoretical models for how hormones modulate individual and social...
Testosterone has been suggested to influence individuals' economic decision making, yet the effects of testosterone on economic behavior are not well-understood and existing research is equivocal. In response, in three studies, we examined the extent to which testosterone affected or was associated with several different facets of economic decision...
Testosterone (T) fluctuates in response to competitive social interactions, with the direction of change typically depending on factors such as contest outcome. Watching a competition may be sufficient to activate T among fans and others who are invested in the outcome. This study explores the change in T associated with vicarious experiences of co...
Objectives
Although social identity has been linked to moral behaviour in past research, we know less about how the identity-enhancing behaviours of athlete leaders may relate to the experience of prosocial and antisocial behaviour between youth sport teammates. This study examined the relations between perceptions of athlete identity leadership an...
Voice is one of the most noticeably dimorphic traits in humans and plays a central role in gender presentation. Transgender males seeking to align internal identity and external gender expression frequently undergo testosterone (T) therapy to masculinize their voices and other traits. We aimed to determine the importance of changes in vocal masculi...
Objectives
The purpose of the current study was to explore parent-athlete sport-related conversations as they naturally occurred in the private contexts that surround youth sport. A secondary aim was to understand whether male and female guardians communicate differently in sport, and whether these differences are shaped by the contexts in which th...
Circulating gonadal hormones have been linked to variation in the structure and function of the adult human brain, raising the question of how cognition is affected by sex hormones in adulthood. The impacts of progestogens and estrogens are of special interest due to the widespread use of hormone supplementation. Multiple studies have analyzed rela...
**Objective**: Hormones are often conceptualized as biological markers of individual differences and have been associated with a variety of behavioral indicators and characteristics, such as mating behavior or acquiring and maintaining dominance. However, before researchers create strong theoretical models for how hormones modulate individual and s...
The interactions between athletes, parents, and coaches outside of the immediate training and competition environments can shape sport participants’ overall experiences. Accordingly, researchers have explored novel approaches that enable the investigation of experiences that occur beyond the sport activity itself. Technological innovations, combine...
Evidence suggests that psychosexuality in humans is modulated by both organizational effects of prenatal and peripubertal sex steroid hormones, and by activational effects of circulating hormones in adulthood. Experimental work in male rodents indicates that sensitivity to androgen-driven organization of sexual motivation decreases across the puber...
Over the past 20 years, social neuroendocrinology researchers have developed pharmacological challenge paradigms to assess the extent to which testosterone plays a causal role in human psychological and behavioural processes. The current paper provides a brief summary of this research and offers recommendations for future research examining the neu...
Background
Previous research on the association between testosterone (T) and immunity has produced conflicting results.
Objectives
We address two potential reasons for these empirical inconsistencies in the present research. First, the association between T and immunity may depend on which branch of the immune system is considered. Here, we examin...
Swift-Gallant et al. (2020) provide a thought-provoking perspective on the topic of digit ratio research, research that has had some prominence in the journal Hormones and Behavior, and is research that has garnered much controversy. In this commentary on their paper, we add to the discussion of why there is skepticism of the use of digit ratios as...
Experiments in male rodents demonstrate that sensitivity to the organizational effects of steroid hormones decreases across the pubertal window, with earlier androgen exposure leading to greater masculinization of the brain and behavior. Similarly, some research suggests the timing of peripubertal exposure to sex steroids influences aspects of huma...
Testosterone is often considered a critical regulator of aggressive behaviour. There is castration/replacement evidence that testosterone indeed drives aggression in some species, but causal evidence in humans is generally lacking and/or-for the few studies that have pharmacologically manipulated testosterone concentrations-inconsistent. More often...
The capacity to infer the mental states of others (known as cognitive empathy) is essential for social interactions, and a well-known theory proposes that it is negatively affected by intrauterine testosterone exposure. Furthermore, previous studies reported that testosterone administration impaired cognitive empathy in healthy adults, and that a b...
Like other animals, humans are sensitive to facial cues of threat. Recent evidence suggests that we use this information to dynamically calibrate competitive decision-making over resources, ceding more to high-threat individuals (who appear more willing/able to retaliate) and keeping more from low-threat individuals. Little is known, however, about...
Hierarchy, the relative ranking of individuals with respect to status or other social dimensions, is ubiquitous across human social groups. However, relatively little is known about the biological factors that may promote or inhibit mobility in status hierarchies. Prominent theoretic perspectives suggest that concentrations of testosterone in the b...
Researchers have argued that the regulation of female sexuality is a major catalyst for women's intrasexual aggression. The present research examined whether women behave more aggressively toward a sexualized woman and whether this is explained by lower ratings of the target's humanness. Results showed that women rated another woman lower on unique...
Little is known about the neurobiological pathways through which testosterone promotes aggression or about the people in whom this effect is observed. Using a psychopharmacogenetic approach, we found that testosterone increases aggression in men ( N = 308) with select personality profiles and that these effects are further enhanced among those with...
Women's mating psychology may have evolved to track reproductive conditions, including conception risk, across and between ovulatory cycles. Alternatively, within-woman correlations between mating psychology and ovarian hormones may be byproducts of between-women relationships. Here, we examined associations between steroid hormones and two facets...
The capacity to infer the mental states of others (known as cognitive empathy) is essential for social interactions, and a well-known theory proposes that it is negatively affected by intrauterine testosterone exposure. Furthermore, previous studies reported that testosterone administration impaired cognitive empathy in healthy adults, and that a b...
Prior evidence suggests that an individual’s attachment orientation is linked to the health and health-related biology of his/her romantic relationship partners. The current study examined whether this effect extends to parent–child relationships. Specifically, we investigated the association between maternal attachment anxiety and avoidance and di...
The social heuristic hypothesis posits that human cooperation is an intuitive response that is expressed especially under conditions of time-constraint. Conversely, it proposes that for individuals given an opportunity for reflection, cooperation is more likely to be curtailed by an optimizing process calibrated to maximize individual benefit in a...
Previous work suggests that testosterone and cortisol interactively predict psychopathy. This effect represents a reversal of the established dual-hormone hypothesis, whereby testosterone is positively correlated with psychopathic traits, but only among individuals with elevated cortisol concentrations. This study aims to replicate the dual-hormone...
Previous research has linked the facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) to a host of psychological and behavioral characteristics, primarily in men. In two studies, we examined novel links between FWHR and sex drive. In Study 1, a sample of 145 undergraduate students revealed that FWHR positively predicted sex drive. There were no significant FWHR × s...
It is well documented that testosterone concentrations change rapidly within reproductively relevant contexts (e.g., competition, mate-seeking). It has been argued that such rapid changes in testosterone may serve to adaptively fine-tune ongoing and/or future social behaviour according to one's social environment. In this paper, we review human cor...
Previous research has established a link between testosterone concentrations in males and their mating effort as it relates to their mate seeking behaviors. However, very little research has analyzed how variability in basal testosterone concentrations of males affects their mating effort once they have secured a romantic partner. In a sample of un...
Previous research indicates that men’s testosterone levels, or personality and contextual variables known to influence testosterone levels, predict men’s attributions of social and personality characteristics from faces. However, the correlational nature of many of these past findings precludes our ability to establish causal pathways. Here, across...
Recent research on testosterone and risk-taking behavior is beginning to focus on the role of context-dependent changes in testosterone. Extending this research, our study investigated the association between testosterone reactivity to competitive outcomes and risk-taking in the context of a video game based competition. The study also examined whe...
One of the most widely studied biological correlates of aggressive behavior is the steroid hormone testosterone. Although traditional wisdom might suggest that individuals with more testosterone are more likely to be aggressive, research over the past several decades has identified important contextual, individual difference, and methodological var...
The Point Subtraction Aggression Paradigm (PSAP) measures aggressive behavior in response to provocations. The aim of the study was to implement the PSAP in a functional neuroimaging environment (fMRI) and evaluate aggression-related brain reactivity including response to provocations and associations with aggression within the paradigm. Twenty hea...
The study of testosterone and aggression originated in experimental studies of animals, showing a direct causal link in some species. Human studies showed an overall weak correlation between testosterone and aggression. A theoretical framework (“the challenge hypothesis”) enabled testosterone-behavior interactions in humans to be framed within a th...
Correlational research has linked testosterone (T) to moral reasoning, such that individuals high in T respond to moral dilemmas in a more utilitarian manner (Carney and Mason 2010). In the present study, 30 male undergraduates completed baseline measures of T, psychopathic traits, and digit-ratio (2D:4D) and were subsequently administered 150 mg o...
The impact of testosterone (T) on the exogenous (Experiment 1) and endogenous (Experiment 2) orienting of visual attention in males was examined. Sixteen male participants completed both an exogenous and an endogenous cuing task on two separate days. About 2–3 h prior to testing, either a placebo or a dose of T was administered. The inhibition of r...
Older adolescent and young adults (OAYA) with type 1 diabetes (T1D) living in contexts of socio-economic disadvantage (SED) suffer disproportionately from poor glycemic control and related health complications. Although SED may convey a variety of risks, it may exacerbate diabetes-related stress levels, which in turn may account for observed dispar...
A contribution to a special issue on Hormones and Human Competition.
Previous research and theory suggest testosterone is an important hormone for modulating aggression and self-regulation. We propose that self-construal, a culturally-relevant difference in how individuals define the self in relation to others, may be an important moderator of the...
A contribution to a special issue on Hormones and Human Competition. Since Archer's (2006) influential meta-analysis, there has been a major increase in the number of studies investigating the effect of competition outcome on testosterone reactivity patterns in humans. Despite this increased research output, there remains debate as to whether compe...
Correlational research suggests that men show greater attraction to feminine female faces when their testosterone (T) levels are high. Men's preferences for feminine faces also seem to vary as a function of relationship context (short versus long-term). However, the relationship between T and preferences for female facial femininity has yet to be t...
The purpose of this paper is to review field studies of human male hormones and reproductive behavior. We first discuss life history theory and related conceptual considerations. As illustrations, distinctive features of human male life histories such as coalitional aggression, long-term partnering and paternal care are noted, along with their rele...
Background:
Although traditional wisdom suggests that baseline levels of testosterone (T) promote aggressive behavior, decades of research have produced findings that have been largely weak and inconsistent. However, more recent experimental work suggests that exogenous administration of T rapidly potentiates amygdala and hypothalamus responses to...
Correlational research has linked low mate value (MV)—one’s worth as a mating partner to members of the opposite sex—with aggression in men. In 2 experiments, we examined the effects of self-perceived MV on men’s reported willingness to aggress directly toward a hypothetical mate poacher (Experiment 1, N = 60) and observable aggression toward a sam...
Identifying mechanisms through which individual differences in reward learning emerge offers an opportunity to understand both a fundamental form of adaptive responding as well as etiological pathways through which aberrant reward learning may contribute to maladaptive behaviors and psychopathology. One candidate mechanism through which individual...
Variation in the facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) maps onto a number of behavioral and psychological traits among men (e.g., aggression, unethical behavior, negotiation performance). Importantly, observer judgments of many of these traits also correlate strongly with the fWHR, suggesting that it may represent an honest cue to dominance and statu...
Early life stress (ELS) is strongly associated with negative outcomes in adulthood, including reduced motivation and increased negative mood. The mechanisms mediating these relations, however, are poorly understood. We examined the relation between exposure to ELS and reward-related brain activity, which is known to predict motivation and mood, at...
Testosterone (T) concentrations change rapidly in the context of human competition, and these changes in neuroendocrine function may serve to modulate future aggressive behavior. However, an increase in T during competition does not translate into aggressive behavior among all individuals. Here, we examined the extent to which individual difference...
The facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) is the width of the face divided by the height of the
upper face. There is mixed evidence for the hypothesis that the FWHR is a cue of threat and
dominance in the human face. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analyses of all
peer-reviewed studies (and 2 unpublished studies) to estimate the magnitude o...
Status hierarchies are universal across human and non–human animal social groups. Hormones and status interact with one another in a reciprocal manner. The present paper reviews the current literature on the interaction between testosterone (T), cortisol (C) and status in humans, with reference to non-human animal research. We discuss the complexit...
Previous work indicates that facial width to height ratio predicts aggressive behavior, particularly when social status is low. The current research extends these findings with experimental evidence that status can moderate the relationship between facial structure and risk-taking. Male participants (N = 165) completed a measure of status, had thei...
Previous research demonstrates that prenatal testosterone exposure increases aggression, possibly through its effects on the structure and function of neural circuits supporting threat detection and emotion regulation. Here we examined associations between regional gray matter volume, trait aggression, and the ratio of the second and fourth digit o...
Previous research suggests that facial-width-to-height ratio (FWHR) predicts aggression, unethical behavior, and non-reciprocity of trust. One limitation of this research is that all samples originate from western countries. To overcome this limitation, the present study investigates the relationship between FWHR and performance among association f...
Since precise forecasting of the future is not possible, most of life’s decisions are made with uncertain outcomes. One important facet of uncertainty that is of particular interest to decision scientists is risk—the choice between an option that is less rewarding but more certain and an option that is less certain, but potentially more rewarding....
A large body of evidence indicates that individual differences in baseline concentrations of testosterone (T) are only weakly correlated with human aggression. Importantly, T concentrations are not static, but rather fluctuate rapidly in the context of competitive interactions, suggesting that acute fluctuations in T may be more relevant for our un...
Background
Previous research suggests that testosterone (T) plays a key role in shaping competitive and aggressive behavior in humans, possibly by modulating threat-related neural circuitry. However, this research has been limited by the use of T augmentation that fails to account for baseline differences and has been conducted exclusively in women...
Variation in the facial width-to-height ratio (face ratio) is associated with judgments of aggression and of trustworthiness made by observers when viewing men's faces. Although judgments of aggression and of trustworthiness are correlated, they represent distinct constructs. We thus investigated the hypothesis that judgments of aggression share st...
Persistence is an important predictor of future successes. The present research addresses the relationship between testosterone and persistence in men. One hundred eighteen men were randomly assigned to win or lose a competitive number tracing task against a confederate or complete the task alone in a non-competitive control condition. Saliva sampl...
We tested the hypotheses that the Fast Track intervention program for high-risk children would reduce adult aggressive behavior and that this effect would be mediated by decreased testosterone responses to social provocation. Participants were a subsample of males from the full trial sample, who during kindergarten had been randomly assigned to the...
The facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is associated with a range of behaviours in men, but little is known about the underlying psychological mechanisms. We tested whether psychopathic personality traits were related to fWHR and mediated the link between this metric and cheating behaviour. Participants (146 men, 76 women) completed the Psychopath...
A growing body of evidence has linked individual differences in facial structure-in particular, the facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR)-to social behaviors, including aggression, cheating, and nonreciprocation of trust. In the research reported here, we extended this work by demonstrating that the association between FWHR and aggression is moderate...
Adopting a powerful posture leads individuals to feel more confident and dominant. Social exclusion can strongly impact individuals' mood and basic social needs. The current research combines these bodies of research, investigating the effects of dominant and submissive poses on responses to social exclusion and inclusion. In two experiments, parti...
Background:
Previous research indicates that younger adults (YA) can identify men's tendency to be aggressive based merely on their neutral expression faces. We compared older adults (OA) and YA accuracy and investigated contributing facial cues.
Method:
In Study 1, YA and OA rated the aggressiveness of young men depicted in facial photographs i...
Objective:
Compelling evidence indicates that disruption in functional connectivity (FC) in brain networks underlies many psychiatric and developmental disorders. Current theory posits that biological (i.e., cortisol) and environmental (i.e., stress) experiences in early life are strong determinants in the development of functional brain systems a...