No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Basal testosterone moderates response to anger faces in humans
Abstract
Prior research [van Honk J, Tuiten A, Verbaten R, van den Hout M, Koppeschaar H, Thijssen J, de Haan E. Correlations among salivary testosterone, mood, and selective attention to threat in humans. Horm Behav 1999;36(1):17-24; van Honk J, Tuiten A, Hermans E, Putman P, Koppeschaar H, Thijssen J, Verbaten R, van Doornen L. A single administration of testosterone induces cardiac accelerative responses to angry faces in healthy young women. Behav Neurosci 2001;115(1):238-42.] showed relationships in humans between testosterone (T) and vigilance to facial expressions of anger, which are considered signals of an impending dominance challenge. In Study 1, we used a differential implicit learning task (DILT) (see [Schultheiss OC, Pang JS, Torges CM, Wirth MM, Treynor W. Perceived facial expressions of emotion as motivational incentives: evidence from a differential implicit learning paradigm. Emotion 2005;5(1):41-54.]) to investigate the degree to which subjects find anger faces reinforcing. In the DILT, separate sequences of actions were paired with presentations of anger faces, neutral faces or a blank screen. After training, performance on the three sequences was measured in the absence of face stimuli. Saliva was collected for T measurement. Higher T predicted better learning on sequences paired with sub-threshold (i.e., presented too fast for conscious awareness) anger faces, suggesting that T is related to reinforcing qualities of these faces. In Study 2, we examined whether morning or afternoon T better predicted attention and vigilance to anger faces. Participants were tested at 9:00 and 15:00. At each session, saliva was collected for T measurement, and participants completed a Stroop task and a dot-probe task [Mogg K, Bradley BP, Hallowell N. Attentional bias to threat: roles of trait anxiety, stressful events, and awareness. Q J Exp Psychol A 1994;47(4):841-64.] with facial expression stimuli. Morning (peak) T was a better predictor of responses to anger faces than afternoon T. Morning T predicted greater Stroop-like interference to sub-threshold anger faces, as well as attentional orienting away from sub-threshold anger faces. These effects were not present for joy faces or for supraliminal anger faces. T may generally decrease aversion to threatening stimuli, and/or may specifically facilitate approach towards signals of dominance challenge.
... For instance, testosterone has been shown to reduce anxiety and physiological stress responses-particularly in anxiety-prone individuals (Hermans et al. 2007(Hermans et al. , 2006avan Honk et al. 2005), to reduce submissive avoidance behavior (Enter et al. 2014(Enter et al. , 2016Terburg et al. 2016) and to promote social approach and fair bargaining (Eisenegger et al. 2010). At the same time, testosterone increases aggression toward threatening stimuli (van Honk and Tuiten 2001;van Honk et al. 1999;Wirth and Schultheiss 2007) and is well known for its ability to reduce certain indices of empathy, such as moral reasoning (Montoya et al. 2013) and facial expression mimicry (Hermans et al. 2006b) while promoting egocentricity (Wright et al. 2012). A number of these effects are thought to arise via interaction with the dopaminergic system (Bell and Sisk 2013) and aromatisation to estradiol (Eisenegger et al. 2011) or in concert with cortisol (Casto and Edwards 2016). ...
... Each participant was allocated to four-session slots-two per day (testosterone/placebo administration session and experimental session four hours later), on two separate days, 2 days apart. Participants were seen at the same time of day for each administration and experimental session, respectively, as testosterone fluctuations are known to occur according to the time of day (Wirth and Schultheiss 2007). Only one participant was seen at the lab at a time for all four sessions. ...
Peripersonal space (PPS) is the space immediately surrounding the body, conceptualised as a sensory-motor interface between body and environment. PPS size differs between individuals and contexts, with intrapersonal traits and states, as well as social factors having a determining role on the size of PPS. Testosterone plays an important role in regulating social-motivational behaviour and is known to enhance dominance motivation in an implicit and unconscious manner. We investigated whether the dominance-enhancing effects of testosterone reflect as changes in the representation of PPS in a within-subjects testosterone administration study in women (N = 19). Participants performed a visuo-tactile integration task in a mixed-reality setup. Results indicated that the administration of testosterone caused a significant enlargement of participants’ PPS, suggesting that testosterone caused participants to implicitly appropriate a larger space as their own. These findings suggest that the dominance-enhancing effects of testosterone reflect at the level of sensory-motor processing in PPS.
... Scholars also argue that T not only prepares individuals for upcoming competition, but also increases their vigilance to status threats and dominance challenges (Eisenegger et al., 2011). Specifically, T has been positively correlated with increases in selective attention to angry faces, such that high-T individuals are more likely to recognize the threatening or competitive behaviors of others (Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). Such findings suggest that individuals with higher T levels may be more likely to perceive antisocial behavior and to attune to their partners' negative or competitive behaviors during conversations about stressors. ...
... Although the current study focused on perceptions of partners' behaviors, future work could seek to address these speculations by coding the behavior of romantic partners. Women's negative associations between T and both accommodation and conversation satisfaction are also consistent with numerous studies that reveal the antisocial properties of T (van Anders, 2013;van Anders et al., 2011;Bos et al., 2010;van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). The present findings suggest that the negative association between T and prosocial behavior carries over into romantic couples' conversations about relational stressors, and may ultimately influence their satisfaction with such interactions. ...
The present study contributes to a growing line of research exploring the associations between physiology and communication behavior. Specifically, this study investigated the influence of testosterone (T) on perceptions of partners' accommodative and nonaccommodative behaviors during a conversation about a relational stressor, and their subsequent association with satisfaction with the conversation. One hundred individuals participated in the study, which included a pre-survey, lab visit, and post-survey. Results revealed that for women, T was negatively associated with perceived partner accommodation and satisfaction with the conversation. Findings uncovered significant mediation effects of women's perceived partner (non)accommodation, while revealing several partner effects. Furthermore, the study found that satisfaction with the conversation was positively predicted by partner accommodation and negatively predicted by partner nonaccommodation for both women and men. These results indicate the utility of communication accommodation theory in examining conflict conversations and imply that T may influence communicative behaviors during conversation about a relational stressor.
... Indeed, in both sexes throughout the mammalian species, testosterone has been linked to social dominance and high status on a range of dominance indices (Eisenegger et al., 2011;Mazur & Booth, 1998;Stanton & Schultheiss, 2009;van der Westhuizen & Solms, 2015). For instance, testosterone has been shown to reduce anxiety and physiological stress responses -particularly in anxiety-prone individuals (Hermans et al., 2007;Hermans, Putman, Baas, Koppeschaar, & van Honk, 2006;van Honk, Peper, & Schutter, 2005), to reduce submissive avoidance behavior (Enter, Spinhoven, & Roelofs, 2014;Enter, Terburg, Harrewijn, Spinhoven, & Roelofs, 2016;Terburg et al., 2016) and to promote social approach and aggression toward threatening stimuli (van Honk & Tuiten, 2001;van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). Testosterone is also well known for its ability to reduce certain indices of empathy, such as moral reasoning (Montoya et al., 2013) and facial expression mimicry and to promote egocentricity (Wright et al., 2012). ...
... Each participant was allocated to four session slots -two per day (testosterone/placebo administration session and experimental session four hours later), on two separate days, two days apart. Participants were seen at the same time of day for each administration and experimental session, respectively, as testosterone fluctuations are known to occur according to the time of day (Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). Only one participant was seen at the lab at a time for all four sessions. ...
Peripersonal space (PPS) is the space immediately surrounding the body, conceptualised as a sensory-motor interface between body and environment. PPS size differs between individuals and contexts, with intrapersonal traits and states, as well as social factors having a determining role on the size of PPS. Testosterone plays an important role in regulating social-motivational behaviour and is known to enhance dominance motivation in an implicit and unconscious manner. We investigated whether the dominance-enhancing effects of testosterone reflect as changes in the representation of PPS in a within-subjects testosterone administration study in women (N=19). Participants performed a visuo-tactile integration task in a mixed-reality setup. Results indicated that the administration of testosterone caused a significant enlargement of participants’ PPS, suggesting that testosterone caused participants to implicitly appropriate a larger space as their own. These findings suggest that the dominance-enhancing effects of testosterone reflect at the level of sensory-motor processing in PPS.
... Furthermore, evidence has also been found of an association between the psychological variables (anger and empathy) and hormones (testosterone and cortisol) analyzed in the present study. Thus, diverse studies have reported a positive association between high testosterone levels and anger measures (Hohlagschwandtner, Husslein, Klier, & Ulm, 2001;Persky, Smith, & Basu, 1971;van Honk et al., 2000;van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007), while many others have found a negative relationship between testosterone and empathic capacity (Auyeung et al., 2009;Chapman et al., 2006;Hermans, Putman, & van Honk, 2006;Pascual-Sagastizabal et al., 2013;van Honk et al., 2011). Few studies, however, have focused on the relationship between cortisol and anger and cortisol and empathy. ...
... Given that a number of studies have associated anger with testosterone (e.g. Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007) and cortisol (e.g. Rausch et al., 2015), and others have also found a relationship between empathy and testosterone (e.g. ...
The aim of this piece of research was to study the existence of clusters based on anger, empathy and cortisol and testosterone measures associated with aggressive behavior in school-aged children. The sample group comprised 139 eight-year-old children (80 boys and 59 girls). Aggressive behavior was measured using the Direct and Indirect Aggression Scale. Both psychological and biological variables were used to determine psychobiological profiles. The psychological variables considered were trait anger, measured using the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory for Children and Adolescents, and empathy, measured using the Empathy Quotient-Child Version. Testosterone and cortisol concentrations were measured through saliva samples and analyzed using an ELISA (Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay). A Cluster Analysis revealed three clusters which were clearly different as regards their psychological and biological characteristics. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that the cluster characterized by having higher anger levels, lower empathy levels and higher testosterone and cortisol levels was more aggressive than the other two ( p < .0001, η ² = .19). The results indicate that studying psychological and biological variables together may help establish differentiated aggression patterns among children.
... Individuals assert status in their interpersonal interactions in rather subtle ways devoid of physical aggression, such as by staring, using dominant body posture, or having longer speech duration (Eisenegger et al., 2011). Not only is T associated with high social dominance and dominance behaviors in both men and women, but also with competition and increased vigilance for status threats (Grant & France, 2005;Rowe et al., 2004;van Anders & Watson, 2006a;van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). ...
... It is argued that T predisposes individuals to recognize angry faces as threats to their social status and elicits a fight or flight response in receivers (Carré & Olmstead, 2015). More specifically, individuals' T levels associate with greater vigilance to dominance challenges and are positively associated with selective attention to angry facial expressions, further increasing individuals' cardiac response to angry faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). Additionally, T administration increased men's perceptions of their own facial dominance (Welling, Moreau, Bird, Hansen, & Carré, 2016). ...
Recent investigations have focused on exploring the role of physiology in human communication, yet a plethora of work is required to better understand how physiology affects or is affected by relational communication and the present investigation contributes to this body of research. This study combined the tenets of communication accommodation theory (CAT), relational uncertainty, and steroid/peptide theory of social bonds (S/P theory) to examine the role of testosterone (T) in romantic partners’ conflict conversation behaviors. More specifically, the study proposed that T moderates the association between romantic partners use of (non)accommodation during conflict conversations and relational uncertainty, which in turn influences their relationship satisfaction. The study also investigated how individuals’ T levels fluctuate in response to their partner’s use of (non)accommodation during conflict conversation. The study tested several actor and partner moderated mediation models to reveal both antisocial andprosocial role of T in romantic partner’s conflict communication. Results revealed that T levels moderate the actor and partner effects of perceived partner (non)accommodation on relational uncertainty differentially, and relational uncertainty mediates the association between perceptions of partner (non)accommodation and relationship satisfaction. In sum, this dissertation support the tenets of CAT and S/P theory of social bonds, and reveals the utility of combining physiology and communication theories to better understand the links between romantic partners’ biology and their communication during conflict conversations. The study provides evidence that the physiology plays an integral role in romantic partners’ relationships and outlines practical advice for relationship nurturance.
... In addition to attention biases as a possible explanation for emotion recognition deficits, hormonal parameters could modulate neural processes affecting facial emotion processing, which may interfere with social functioning (Little, 2013). Firstly, sex steroids such as testosterone (T) have been related to improvements in male detection of angry faces (Derntl et al., 2009;Stanton, Wirth, Waugh, & Schultheiss, 2009;van Honk & Schutter, 2007a;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007), but those studies failed to find an association between T levels and faces with a neutral or positive value. However, T levels have been negatively related to the capacity to infer the thoughts and feelings of others (Ronay & Carney, 2013). ...
... Additionally, this study investigated the potential moderating effect of group (IPV perpetrators vs. controls) and basal hormonal parameters (T, C and T/C ratio) on the potential relationship of attention deficits with emotion recognition skills. Previous studies have found that violent populations tend to present a bias toward negative faces and that T levels were positively and C negatively correlated with angry faces and unrelated to other kinds of emotional stimuli (Derntl et al., 2009;Stanton et al., 2009;van Honk & Schutter, 2007b;van Honk et al., 1998;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). Hence, we hypothesized that high basal T and low basal C levels improve general emotion recognition, and that these associations are significant only in IPV perpetrators. ...
Several studies have reported impairments in decoding emotional facial expressions in intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrators. However, the mechanisms that underlie these impaired skills are not well known. Given this gap in the literature, we aimed to establish whether IPV perpetrators (n = 18) differ in their emotion decoding process, attentional skills, and testosterone (T), cortisol (C) levels and T/C ratio in comparison with controls (n = 20), and also to examine the moderating role of the group and hormonal parameters in the relationship between attention skills and the emotion decoding process. Our results demonstrated that IPV perpetrators showed poorer emotion recognition and higher attention switching costs than controls. Nonetheless, they did not differ in attention to detail and hormonal parameters. Finally, the slope predicting emotion recognition from deficits in attention switching became steeper as T levels increased, especially in IPV perpetrators, although the basal C and T/C ratios were unrelated to emotion recognition and attention deficits for both groups. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying emotion recognition deficits. These factors therefore constitute the target for future interventions.
... effects of increased cortisol concentration (Sapolsky et al., 2000;Wüst et al., 2005). Some stress-related mental disorders such as depression and psychotic disorders, are frequently associated with low assertiveness, contributing to the experience of stressful interpersonal circumstances that may reduce the coping abilities (Wirth and Schultheiss, 2007;Procyshyn et al., 2020). Some other studies have argued that urban citizens are more challenged by social evaluative stressors than rural citizens (Lederbogen et al., 2011). ...
Background
Living in urban places has been associated with a higher risk of psychopathology as well as with altered hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis and consequently altered cortisol response, but studies have concentrated mainly in high-income countries population. The role of other hormones such as testosterone, implicated in stress response and with human social behaviors, have not yet been investigated. The aim of this study was to compare symptoms of psychopathology as well as cortisol and testosterone in response to traumatic images between urban and suburban people in a middle-income country.
Methods
A sample of 67 women and 55 men (N = 122, 18–45 years) from urban and suburban places of Mexico participated in the study. We quantified salivary cortisol and testosterone in response to images with traumatic and violent content (basal, 15, 30, and 45 min after images). Participants answered a general information questionnaire and the Symptom Checklist-90-R to assess their psychopathological traits. We performed Generalized Estimating Equation Models to analyze hormonal levels and MANOVAs to compare differences in participants’ psychopathology symptoms. Area under the curve respect to ground (AUCG) of hormonal levels and sex differences were also compared.
Results
Suburban citizens showed no cortisol response, whereas urban people showed a cortisol peak 15 min after the image’s exposure; however, suburban people had higher AUCG and basal levels compared to urban ones. Contrastingly, testosterone levels declined in all participants excepting the urban women, who showed no testosterone response. Although similar testosterone profile, AUCG levels were higher in urban than suburban men. Participants living in suburban areas had higher scores of somatizations, obsessive–compulsive, and interpersonal sensitivity, as well as more sleep disorders than participants living in urban areas.
Conclusion
This study offers novel evidence about differences in cortisol and testosterone responses to a social stressor and in mental health indicators between a population of urban and suburban citizens, highlighting the impact of urbanization process on physiological and psychological outcomes in a middle-income country.
... Some evidence indicates that induced anger is associated with increases in T during situations intended to gain dominance, power, and control over the social situation. Other studies have demonstrated that high levels of T, naturally or administered, enhance selective attention to facial angry expressions, vigilance to facial expressions of anger, and neural activity in response to angry faces, all of which may facilitate the decision of approach/avoid towards signals of dominance or power (Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). ...
... Difference in hormones levels could explain this sex difference in this Distraction task. For instance, in human research, testosterone level was associated in males with a greater attention toward negative social cues (van Honk et al., 1999;Watson et al., 2015;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). In animals, male rhesus macaques' testosterone level significantly increased watching time of video clips which depicted fights between unfamiliar conspecifics . ...
Living in a complex social environment requires primates to manage their emotions and inhibit impulsive behaviours. The cognitive processes that underpin these behaviours, crucial in many aspects of everyday life, are defined as inhibitory control. In animal studies, the various paradigms designed to measure inhibitory control often suffer from a lack of systematic validation. Moreover, striking individual variations in inhibitory control performances are often largely ignored and their causes rarely considered. Finally, little is known about the selective forces that shape the evolution of inhibitory control. It has been suggested that one route by which this ability can be enhanced is through selection on social tolerance. Hence the aim of this project was threefold: 1-to develop a battery of inhibitory control tasks in non-human primates 2-to use this task battery to systematically investigate individual variability and its most common causes 3-on a broader evolutionary scale, to compare the inhibitory control skills in three species which differ in social tolerance style. For that purpose, we tested 66 macaques (28 Macaca mulatta, 19 M. fascicularis and 18 M. tonkeana) in a battery of touchscreen tasks assessing three main components of inhibitory control: inhibition of a distraction (using a Distraction task), inhibition of an impulsive action (using a Go/No-go task) and inhibition of a cognitive set (using a Reversal learning task). We found that all tasks were reliable and effective at measuring the inhibition of an impulsive and automatic response. We then demonstrated individual variations, sex and age differences in inhibitory control performances. Finally we demonstrated that the least tolerant species were poorer at controlling their emotions and impulsions compared to other species. Overall, this project will help to get more insight into the multifaceted structure and the evolution of inhibitory control in primates.
... Steroid hormones in particular have been found to have diverse effects on behaviour and cognition, aside from their roles in facilitating reproductive and metabolic functions (Nelson, 2000;Luine, 2008;Eisenegger et al., 2011). Levels of testosterone, for example, have been found to correlate with decision-making in situations involving risk and cooperation (Burnham, 2007;Apicella et al., 2008;Stanton et al., 2011), abilities to discriminate emotion in faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007;Derntl et al., 2009), and capacities pertaining to mental rotation (Hooven et al., 2004;Alexander & Son, 2007). Meanwhile, administration of testosterone in men has been demonstrated to directly affect decision-making in cooperative interactions (Zak et al., 2009), avoid/approach responses to emotional face stimuli (Volman et al., 2011), and success in spatial memory and navigation tasks (Janowsky et al., 1994;Cherrier et al., 2001). ...
... Steroid hormones in particular have been found to have diverse effects on behaviour and cognition, aside from their roles in facilitating reproductive and metabolic functions (Nelson, 2000;Luine, 2008;Eisenegger et al., 2011). Levels of testosterone, for example, have been found to correlate with decision-making in situations involving risk and cooperation (Burnham, 2007;Apicella et al., 2008;Stanton et al., 2011), abilities to discriminate emotion in faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007;Derntl et al., 2009), and capacities pertaining to mental rotation (Hooven et al., 2004;Alexander & Son, 2007). Meanwhile, administration of testosterone in men has been demonstrated to directly affect decision-making in cooperative interactions (Zak et al., 2009), avoid/approach responses to emotional face stimuli (Volman et al., 2011), and success in spatial memory and navigation tasks (Janowsky et al., 1994;Cherrier et al., 2001). ...
... Steroid hormones in particular have been found to have diverse effects on behaviour and cognition, aside from their roles in facilitating reproductive and metabolic functions (Nelson, 2000;Luine, 2008;Eisenegger et al., 2011). Levels of testosterone, for example, have been found to correlate with decision-making in situations involving risk and cooperation (Burnham, 2007;Apicella et al., 2008;Stanton et al., 2011), abilities to discriminate emotion in faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007;Derntl et al., 2009), and capacities pertaining to mental rotation (Hooven et al., 2004;Alexander & Son, 2007). Meanwhile, administration of testosterone in men has been demonstrated to directly affect decision-making in cooperative interactions (Zak et al., 2009), avoid/approach responses to emotional face stimuli (Volman et al., 2011), and success in spatial memory and navigation tasks (Janowsky et al., 1994;Cherrier et al., 2001). ...
... Steroid hormones in particular have been found to have diverse effects on behaviour and cognition, aside from their roles in facilitating reproductive and metabolic functions (Nelson, 2000;Luine, 2008;Eisenegger et al., 2011). Levels of testosterone, for example, have been found to correlate with decision-making in situations involving risk and cooperation (Burnham, 2007;Apicella et al., 2008;Stanton et al., 2011), abilities to discriminate emotion in faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007;Derntl et al., 2009), and capacities pertaining to mental rotation (Hooven et al., 2004;Alexander & Son, 2007). Meanwhile, administration of testosterone in men has been demonstrated to directly affect decision-making in cooperative interactions (Zak et al., 2009), avoid/approach responses to emotional face stimuli (Volman et al., 2011), and success in spatial memory and navigation tasks (Janowsky et al., 1994;Cherrier et al., 2001). ...
... Steroid hormones in particular have been found to have diverse effects on behaviour and cognition, aside from their roles in facilitating reproductive and metabolic functions (Nelson, 2000;Luine, 2008;Eisenegger et al., 2011). Levels of testosterone, for example, have been found to correlate with decision-making in situations involving risk and cooperation (Burnham, 2007;Apicella et al., 2008;Stanton et al., 2011), abilities to discriminate emotion in faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007;Derntl et al., 2009), and capacities pertaining to mental rotation (Hooven et al., 2004;Alexander & Son, 2007). Meanwhile, administration of testosterone in men has been demonstrated to directly affect decision-making in cooperative interactions (Zak et al., 2009), avoid/approach responses to emotional face stimuli (Volman et al., 2011), and success in spatial memory and navigation tasks (Janowsky et al., 1994;Cherrier et al., 2001). ...
... Steroid hormones in particular have been found to have diverse effects on behaviour and cognition, aside from their roles in facilitating reproductive and metabolic functions (Nelson, 2000;Luine, 2008;Eisenegger et al., 2011). Levels of testosterone, for example, have been found to correlate with decision-making in situations involving risk and cooperation (Burnham, 2007;Apicella et al., 2008;Stanton et al., 2011), abilities to discriminate emotion in faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007;Derntl et al., 2009), and capacities pertaining to mental rotation (Hooven et al., 2004;Alexander & Son, 2007). Meanwhile, administration of testosterone in men has been demonstrated to directly affect decision-making in cooperative interactions (Zak et al., 2009), avoid/approach responses to emotional face stimuli (Volman et al., 2011), and success in spatial memory and navigation tasks (Janowsky et al., 1994;Cherrier et al., 2001). ...
... Steroid hormones in particular have been found to have diverse effects on behaviour and cognition, aside from their roles in facilitating reproductive and metabolic functions (Nelson, 2000;Luine, 2008;Eisenegger et al., 2011). Levels of testosterone, for example, have been found to correlate with decision-making in situations involving risk and cooperation (Burnham, 2007;Apicella et al., 2008;Stanton et al., 2011), abilities to discriminate emotion in faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007;Derntl et al., 2009), and capacities pertaining to mental rotation (Hooven et al., 2004;Alexander & Son, 2007). Meanwhile, administration of testosterone in men has been demonstrated to directly affect decision-making in cooperative interactions (Zak et al., 2009), avoid/approach responses to emotional face stimuli (Volman et al., 2011), and success in spatial memory and navigation tasks (Janowsky et al., 1994;Cherrier et al., 2001). ...
... Steroid hormones in particular have been found to have diverse effects on behaviour and cognition, aside from their roles in facilitating reproductive and metabolic functions (Nelson, 2000;Luine, 2008;Eisenegger et al., 2011). Levels of testosterone, for example, have been found to correlate with decision-making in situations involving risk and cooperation (Burnham, 2007;Apicella et al., 2008;Stanton et al., 2011), abilities to discriminate emotion in faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007;Derntl et al., 2009), and capacities pertaining to mental rotation (Hooven et al., 2004;Alexander & Son, 2007). Meanwhile, administration of testosterone in men has been demonstrated to directly affect decision-making in cooperative interactions (Zak et al., 2009), avoid/approach responses to emotional face stimuli (Volman et al., 2011), and success in spatial memory and navigation tasks (Janowsky et al., 1994;Cherrier et al., 2001). ...
... Then, the observed testosterone decreases in both populations might indicate an emotional empathic or fear response. Whereas the higher androgen levels might contribute to maintain an increased state of vigilance and competitiveness among urban citizens, as it has been described by some other authors [54][55]. ...
Purpose: To evaluate alterations in cortisol and testosterone response after the exposure to images with traumatic or violent content, as well as their association with mental health indicators, by comparing an urban and a suburban population in a middle-income country.
Methods: We quantified cortisol and testosterone response in a sample of 122 voluntaries from the State of Mexico, and from Mexico City, using saliva samples collected at 0, 15, 30, and 60 min after the exposure of images with violent content. Participants answered a general information questionnaire and the Symptom Checklist-90-R to assess their mental health status. Generalized Estimating Equation Models were built to analyze cortisol and testosterone levels and MANOVAs were performed to test differences in participants’ mental health between cities.
Results: We found higher basal cortisol levels and a flat cortisol response in the suburban population compared to the urban one, who had lower basal levels and a peak 15 minutes after the images exposure. Testosterone levels in men decreased at 30 min, but basal levels were higher in urban men. Testosterone levels decreased 30 min after images exposure only in suburban women. Participants living in suburban areas had higher scores of somatization, obsessive-compulsive and interpersonal sensitivity, as well as more sleep disorders than participants living in urban areas.
Conclusion: This study offers novel evidence about differences in cortisol and testosterone responses to a socially evaluative stressor and in mental health indicators between urban and suburban citizens, highlighting the impact of urbanization process on physiological and psychological outcomes.
... At the behavioral level, there was no significant difference between aggressive and non-aggressive words under frustrating conditions in reaction times for the high-empathy individuals. The reasons for this result may be that dot-probe task and emotional Stroop task is different; in the dotprobe task, individuals choose between two stimuli, and the measured attentional bias included many components such as attentional transfer retention and disengagement; however, in the emotional Stroop task, individuals were required to pay attention to the color of words, which involved the processing competition between different attributes of only a single stimulus (word types and colors) (Mogg et al., 2000;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). Thus, although the meaning of specific words may effectively catch the individual's attention, it doesn't show up in explicit behavioral outcomes. ...
This study describes two experiments conducted to investigate the modifying effect of trait empathy on attentional processing of emotionally laden (i.e., aggression-related) words in frustrating situations. A dot-probe task was used in the first experiment. The results showed that low-empathy individuals exhibited attentional bias toward aggressive words under both frustrating and nonfrustrating conditions. High-empathy individuals demonstrated attentional bias only under frustrating conditions. In the second experiment, the effect of frustration on high-empathy individuals’ aggression was reflected by N200, P300, and late positive potential amplitudes. It was discussed that these amplitudes might indicate that frustrating situations caused high-empathy individuals to show attentional bias toward aggressive words. Our findings suggested that high-empathy individuals were sensitive to emotionally laden (i.e., aggression-related) stimuli under frustrating conditions.
... This sex difference in inhibitory control could be explained by difference in hormones levels. For instance, in human research, testosterone level is associated in males with a greater attention to negative social cues [103,104]. In animals, male rhesus macaques' testosterone level significantly increased watching time of video clips which depicted fights between unfamiliar conspecifics [105]. ...
Inhibitory control, the ability to override a dominant response, is crucial in many aspects of everyday life. In animal studies, striking individual variations are often largely ignored and their causes rarely considered. Hence, our aims were to systematically investigate individual variability in inhibitory control, to replicate the most common causes of individual variation (age, sex and rank) and to determine if these factors had a consistent effect on three main components of inhibitory control (inhibition of a distraction, inhibition of an action, inhibition of a cognitive set). We tested 21 rhesus macaques ( Macaca mulatta ) in a battery of validated touchscreen tasks. We first found individual variations in all inhibitory control performances. We then demonstrated that males had poorer performances to inhibit a distraction and that middle-aged individuals exhibited poorer performance in the inhibition of a cognitive set. Hence, the factors of age and sex were not consistently associated with the main components of inhibitory control, suggesting a multi-faceted structure. The rank of the subjects did not influence any inhibitory control performances. This study adopts a novel approach for animal behaviour studies and gives new insight into the individual variability of inhibitory control which is crucial to understand its evolutionary underpinnings.
... The diurnal rhythmicity of arousal interacts with stable trait measures of impulsivity to affect cognitive performance (Revelle et al., 1980). Testosterone levels systematically decline during the day and affect the emotional reactions to angry faces (Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). "Owls" and "larks" differ in the phase of their diurnal body temperature rhythm (Baehr et al., 2000). ...
The study of personality dynamics has a long history of being said to be important, but a much shorter history of actually being examined. We give an overview of the past 100 years of research on dynamic processes and suggest how recent methodological and analytic techniques can be applied to the important problem of studying individual differences in the coherent patterning over time of affect, behavior, and cognition.
... For instance, displays of dominance such as body postures portraying supremacy and increased speech duration and staring duration have been linked to high circulating testosterone levels (Mazur, 2005). Likewise, baseline testosterone levels are associated with increased vigilance for status threats, such as facial expressions of anger (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). Furthermore, circulating testosterone levels have been associated with greater aggression (Archer, 1991), with reduced generosity (Wu et al., 2019), and with greater resource accumulation to increase social dominance (Mazur & Booth, 1998). ...
In line with recent research suggesting that testosterone may only be related to decisions under specific conditions, we show that testosterone is associated with conspicuous consumption only when intrasexual competition is high. In three studies, we provide empirical evidence that prenatal and circulating testosterone are only related to conspicuous consumption when intrasexual competition is high. These findings are in line with recent literature that posits that testosterone is only related to particular decisions or behavior when status is at stake. In Study 1, we find that masculinized digit ratios (an indicator of high prenatal testosterone exposure) are only related to greater conspicuous consumption preferences for men that score high on an intrasexual competitiveness trait measure. In Study 2, we find that masculin-ized digit ratios are associated with greater conspicuous consumption preferences, but only among men who are primed with an intrasexual competition recall task. Finally, the purpose of Study 3 was to test if similar effects held when measuring circulating testosterone. We show that baseline levels of circulating testosterone are associated with greater conspicuous consumption preferences, but only after men are primed with intrasexual competition. Overall, we identify intrasexual competition as a crucial precondition for relationships between testosterone (prenatal and circulating) and conspicuous consumption to emerge. We argue that men with masculin-ized digit ratios and men with high circulating testosterone may be more likely to choose conspicuous products as a status-signaling strategy in the mating market if they are inherently intrasexually competitive or when they encounter an intrasexually competitive situation.
... Steroid hormones in particular have been found to have diverse effects on behaviour and cognition, aside from their roles in facilitating reproductive and metabolic functions (Nelson, 2000;Luine, 2008;Eisenegger et al., 2011). Levels of testosterone, for example, have been found to correlate with decision-making in situations involving risk and cooperation (Burnham, 2007;Apicella et al., 2008;Stanton et al., 2011), abilities to discriminate emotion in faces (van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007;Derntl et al., 2009), and capacities pertaining to mental rotation (Hooven et al., 2004;Alexander & Son, 2007). Meanwhile, administration of testosterone in men has been demonstrated to directly affect decision-making in cooperative interactions (Zak et al., 2009), avoid/approach responses to emotional face stimuli (Volman et al., 2011), and success in spatial memory and navigation tasks (Janowsky et al., 1994;Cherrier et al., 2001). ...
The evolutionary origins of human right-handedness remain poorly understood. Some have hypothesized that tool use served as an important preadaptation for the eventual evolution of population-level right-handedness. In contrast, others have suggested that complex gestural and vocal communication served as prerequisite for the evolution of human right-handedness. In this study, we tested these competing hypotheses by comparing the handedness of bonobos and chimpanzees, two closely related species of Pan, on three different measures of hand use including simple reaching, manual gestures and coordinated bimanual actions. Chimpanzees are well known for their tool using abilities whereas bonobos rarely use tools in the wild. In contrast, many have suggested that bonobos have a more flexible gestural and vocal communication system than chimpanzees. The overall results showed that chimpanzees were significantly more right-handed than bonobos for all three measures suggesting that adaptations for tool use rather than communication may have led to the emergence of human right-handedness. We further show that species differences in handedness may be linked to variation in the size and asymmetry of the motor-hand area of the precentral gyrus. The results are discussed within the context of evolutionary theories of handedness, as well as some limitations in the approach to handedness measurement in nonhuman primates.
... Moreover, the authors found a negative correlation between T and RT to fearful male faces (the higher the T level, the faster the response time). Similar patterns were reported by a variety of studies which showed that, through increased amygdala activity, T directs attention to threat related social cues, in particularly to emotions, such as fear (e.g., Bos et al., 2013) andanger (e.g., van Honk et al., 1999;Wirth and Schultheiss, 2007). In addition, during approach-avoidance tasks, both healthy and social anxious females showed less avoidance and faster RTs towards angry faces after T administration (e.g., Enter et al., 2016Enter et al., , 2014. ...
Successful emotion recognition is a key component of human socio-emotional communication skills. However, little is known about the factors impacting males’ accuracy in emotion recognition tasks. This pre-registered study examined potential candidates, focusing on the modality of stimulus presentation, emotion category and individual baseline hormone levels. In an additional exploratory analysis, we examined the association of testosterone x cortisol interaction with recognition accuracy and reaction times. We obtained accuracy and reaction time scores from 282 males who categorized voice, face and voice-face stimuli for nonverbal emotional content. Results showed that recognition accuracy was significantly higher in the audio-visual than in the auditory or visual modality. While Spearman’s rank correlations showed no significant association of testosterone (T) with recognition accuracy or with response times for specific emotions, the logistic and linear regression models uncovered some evidence for a positive association between T and recognition accuracy as well as between cortisol (C) and reaction time. In addition, the overall effect size of T by C interaction with recognition accuracy and reaction time was significant, but small. Our results establish that audio-visual congruent stimuli enhance recognition accuracy and provide novel empirical support by showing that the interaction of testosterone and cortisol relates to males’ accuracy and response times in emotion recognition tasks.
... For a variety of animal species, aggression by the male appears necessary for that male to command territory and other resources, thus to attract females. In humans, higher T levels are thought to be associated with aggression [81], [82], [83], [84], [85], [86], [87], [88], [89]. Some studies solely rely on self-report measures of aggression, using questionnaires [84], and may or may not include participants with offender status [81], while other studies only recruit healthy men in a laboratory setting [90]. ...
Background
During the past 50 years, motivational studies have evolved from the logical inference of logically required “intervening variables” to explain behavioral change, to electrophysiological and molecular analyses of the mechanisms causing such changes.
Aim
The purpose of this review article is two-fold: first to describe the logic of sexual motivation in a way that applies to laboratory animals as well as humans, and the second is to address some of the problems of sexual motivation experienced by men.
Results
When problems of motivational mechanisms are stripped down to their essentials, as performed in the laboratory animal models and are available for reductionistic studies, then the problems can be solved with certainty, as illustrated in the first part of this review. However, with respect to human sexual motivation, the various determinants which include so many behavioral routes and so many brain states come into play, that definite conclusions are harder to come by, as illustrated in the second part of this review.
Conclusions
This review highlights a number of key questions that merit further investigation. These include (a) What mechanisms do cultural and experiential influences interact with androgenic hormone influences on human sexual motivation? (b) How would epigenetic effects in the human brain related to changes in motivation be investigated? (c) What are the effects of unpredictable traumatic and stressful human experiences on sexual motivation; (d) How such mechanisms are activated upon unpredictable traumatic and stressful insults? (e) What are the outstanding differences between sexual motivational drive and motivations driven by homeostatic systems such as hunger and thirst?
... T is responsible for the development and maintenance of masculine characteristics such as the penis, muscles, and beard, but it is also related to a variety of social behaviours and personality traits especially those associated with intrasexual competition (Mehta & Josephs, 2007). For example, throughout puberty and adulthood high T levels are related to higher incidence of aggression (Carré & McCormick, 2008; see Batrinos, 2012 for a review), dominant personalities (Mazur & Booth, 1998;Slatcher et al., 2011), hostility (Hartgens & Kuipers, 2004), increased vigilance for status threats (Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007), and competitiveness (Borráz-León et al., 2018b). These investigations show that high T levels allow a better performance in a social competition for resources, similar to phenomena observed in nature with non-human animals (e.g., Wobber et al., 2010;Surbeck et al., 2012;Martínez-Padilla et al., 2014). ...
The development of indirect mechanisms of intrasexual competition (e.g., visual identification of possible rivals) could be related to personality traits such as aggressiveness and self-esteem. However, the study of endocrine changes associated to indirect mechanisms of intrasexual competition is scarce. The aim of this study was to investigate the changes in testosterone levels after a rival choice test in men and how intrasexual competitiveness, aggressiveness, and self-esteem modulate these changes. A group of 160 healthy men answered four personality questionnaires, participated in a rival choice test, and donated saliva samples to measure the changes in their testosterone levels. We found a significant decrease in testosterone levels of men with lower intrasexual competitiveness, but testosterone levels remained stable in competitive men. Non-significant results were found for aggressiveness and self-esteem. These decreases in testosterone levels could be interpreted as an adaptation aimed to reduce costs in male-male contests in Western modern societies.
... Husbands and wives can also be verbally and (less commonly) physically aggressive toward their partners. Thus, men's within-individual profiles of relatively elevated T and reduced OT in conflicted marriages also conceptually align with psychobiological research linking higher T to reactive responses to status threats as well as lower OT to reduced empathy (Crespi, 2016;Feldman, 2012;Wagels et al., 2018;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). ...
Introduction:
Testosterone and oxytocin are psychobiological mechanisms that interrelate with relationship quality between parents and the quantity and quality of parenting behaviors, thereby affecting child outcomes. Their joint production based on family dynamics has rarely been tested, particularly cross-culturally.
Methods:
We explored family function and salivary testosterone and oxytocin in mothers and fathers in a small-scale, fishing-farming society in Republic of the Congo. Fathers ranked one another in three domains of family life pertaining to the local cultural model of fatherhood.
Results:
Fathers who were viewed as better providers had relatively lower oxytocin and higher testosterone than men seen as poorer providers, who had lower testosterone and higher oxytocin. Fathers also had higher testosterone and lower oxytocin in marriages with more conflict, while those who had less marital conflict had reduced testosterone and higher oxytocin. In contrast, mothers in conflicted marriages showed the opposite profiles of relatively lower testosterone and higher oxytocin. Mothers had higher oxytocin and lower testosterone if fathers were uninvolved as direct caregivers, while mothers showed an opposing pattern for the two hormones if fathers were seen as involved with direct care.
Conclusions:
These results shed new light on parents' dual oxytocin and testosterone profiles in a small-scale society setting and highlight the flexibility of human parental psychobiology when fathers' roles and functions within families differ across cultures.
... This perspective is consistent with findings showing associations between hormone concentrations and behaviour when controlling for self-reports of personality (e.g., Geniole, Busseri, & McCormick, 2013;Akinola et al., 2016). However, we note that studies supporting the idea that T affects automatic processes outside of conscious awareness (e.g., gaze aversion, early threat processing) are typically based on small samples, and the relevant effects often emerge from 2-way or 3-way interaction tests (e.g., Terburg et al., 2012;van Honk et al., 2005;van Peer et al., 2017;Welling et al., 2016;Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). Some of the same methodological issues that may have led to spurious and/or inflated findings in the Dual Hormone literature also apply to the literature on implicit motivation. ...
Decades of research in behavioral endocrinology has implicated the gonadal hormone testosterone in the regulation of mating effort, often expressed in primates in the form of aggressive and/or status-striving behavior. Based on the idea that neuroendocrine axes influence each other, recent work among humans has proposed that links between testosterone and indices of status-striving are rendered conditional by the effects of glucocorticoids. The Dual Hormone hypothesis is one particular instance of this argument, predicting that cortisol blocks the effects of testosterone on dominance, aggression, and risk-taking in humans. Support for the Dual Hormone Hypothesis is wide-ranging, but considerations of theoretical ambiguity, null findings, and low statistical power pose problems for interpreting the published literature. Here, we contribute to the development of the Dual Hormone hypothesis by (1) critically reviewing the extant literature-including p-curve analyses of published findings; and, (2) "opening the file drawer" and examining relationships between testosterone, cortisol, and status-striving personality features in seven previously published studies from our laboratories (total N = 718; median N per feature = 318) that examined unrelated predictions. Results from p-curve suggest that published studies have only 16% power to detect effects, while our own data show no robust interactions between testosterone and cortisol in predicting status-striving personality features. We discuss the implications of these results for the Dual Hormone hypothesis, limitations of our analyses, and the development of future research.
... That is, dominant individuals are perceived as more competent (Anderson and Kilduff, 2009), which is in turn strongly related to social status (Fiske et al., 2002). Although metaanalytical evidence is lacking, several studies indicate that dominance is positively related to testosterone (Mehta and Beer, 2010;Archer, 2006;Turan et al., 2014;Slatcher et al., 2011;Mazur and Booth, 1998;Van der Meij et al., 2008;Wirth and Schultheiss, 2007, see Mehta and Josephs, 2010 for an overview of studies). However, some exceptions have been reported. ...
According to the dual-hormone hypothesis, the relationship between testosterone and status-relevant behavior is moderated by cortisol, suggesting this relationship only exists when cortisol is low. In the current study, a meta-analysis (including 30 papers with 33 studies, 49 effect sizes, n = 8538) on the interaction effect of testosterone and cortisol on status-relevant behavior (i.e. status, dominance, risk taking, aggression, and psychopathy) was performed. There was only marginal support for the dual-hormone hypothesis: The effect size of the interaction between testosterone and cortisol on status-relevant behavior was significant but very small (r =-.061, p = .026), which was corroborated by follow-up meta-analyses on simple slopes on low and high cortisol. Effect sizes were largest for direct status measures, although not significantly different from other outcome measures. Similarly, effect sizes seemed larger for men than for women. However, robustness analyses indicated signs of publication bias, enhanced significance due to potential flexibility in data-analysis, and a lack of power of individual studies, emphasizing the need for a large, pre-registered study.
... In both men and women, morning T concentrations have been linked to greater attention toward both subliminal (Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007) and supraliminal angry faces presented as distractors (van Honk et al., 1999). Likewise, exogenous T administration suppresses implicit gaze aversion from angry faces (Enter, Terburg, Harrewijn, Spinhoven, & Roelofs, 2016;Terburg et al., 2016), and an acute rise in T has been associated with greater attention to subliminally, but not supraliminally presented angry facial expressions (van Honk et al., 2000). ...
Implicit measures of aggressiveness are able to circumvent response biases that plague self-reports, but it is unclear how they link to neural activation during aggressive interactions and to aggression-related endocrine function. Here, we tested whether an implicit attentional bias toward antisocial semantic information was associated with endogenous testosterone (T) and cortisol (C) levels, as well as with aggressive behavior and amygdala reactivity to angry faces in a separate competitive paradigm. On Day one, participants (39 healthy young women) completed an emotional word Stroop task in which they had to indicate the font color of antisocial, prosocial, or neutral words. On Day two, we measured subjects' brain activity during a competitive reaction time task in which the female opponent displayed angry or neutral facial expressions at the start of each trial and provoked participants with increasingly strong sound blasts. T and C were measured in saliva during a regular weekday as well as before and after scanning. We previously showed that aggression was associated with enhanced amygdala reactivity to angry faces in this sample. The present analyses revealed that subjects were slower to identify the font color of antisocial relative to neutral words, and that this attentional bias predicted higher aggression. T and C were uncorrelated with Stroop scores. Crucially, the relationship between implicit attention to antisocial words and aggression was mediated by amygdala reactivity to angry faces. Our data indicate that a tendency to dwell on implicit hostile cues reflects enhanced responsivity to overt anger displays. K E Y W O R D S aggression, amygdala, antisocial, cortisol, emotional word Stroop, fMRI, testosterone
... Testosterone also shows a circadian rhythm, with levels highest in the morning followed by decreasing levels throughout the day. The likelihood of detecting effects depends on the time of day testosterone is sampled as well as the nature of the outcome variable testosterone is posited to influence (Wirth and Schultheiss, 2007, but see Liening et al., 2010). Additionally, seasonal variations of testosterone have been observed in men, with testosterone levels higher in the fall and lower in the spring (Harris, 1999). ...
... While the findings replicate the context effect, it remains open if T modified the perception of the context or the decision of how to act in a corresponding context. Several studies suggest that exogenous T modifies the perception of social threat Wirth and Schultheiss, 2007;Wagels et al., 2017a). Neural processing of reward and social threat seems to be altered under T (Hermans et al., 2008(Hermans et al., , 2010Radke et al., 2015). ...
Testosterone affects human social behavior in various ways. While testosterone effects are generally associated with muscular strength and aggressiveness, human studies also point towards enhanced status–seeking motives after testosterone administration. The current study tested the causal influence of exogenous testosterone on male behavior during a competitive provocation paradigm.
... While the findings replicate the context effect, it remains open if T modified the perception of the context or the decision of how to act in a corresponding context. Several studies suggest that exogenous T modifies the perception of social threat Wirth and Schultheiss, 2007;Wagels et al., 2017a). Neural processing of reward and social threat seems to be altered under T (Hermans et al., 2008(Hermans et al., , 2010Radke et al., 2015). ...
Testosterone affects human social behavior in various ways. While testosterone effects are generally associated with muscular strength and aggressiveness, human studies also point towards enhanced status–seeking motives after testosterone administration. The current study tested the causal influence of exogenous testosterone on male behavior during a competitive provocation paradigm. In this double blind, randomized, placebo (PL)-controlled study, 103 males were assigned to a PL or testosterone group receiving a colorless PL or testosterone gel. To induce provocation, males played a rigged reaction time game against an ostensible opponent. When participants lost, the opponent subtracted money from the participant who in return could subtract money from the ostensible opponent. Participants subjectively indicated anger and self-estimated treatment affiliation (testosterone or PL administration). A trial-by-trial analysis demonstrated that provocation and success during the repeated games had a stronger influence on participants’ choice to reduce money from the opponent if they had received testosterone. Participants who believed to be in the testosterone group were angrier after the experiment and increased monetary reductions during the task course. In line with theories about mechanisms of testosterone in humans, provocation is shown to be necessary for the agency of exogenous testosterone. Thus, testosterone reinforces the conditional adjustment of aggressive behavior but not aggressive behavior per se. In contrast undirected frustration is not increased by testosterone but probably interferes with cognitive appraisals about biological mechanisms of testosterone.
... Men whose T increased in response to a task were also more likely to choose to compete again (Carré and McCormick 2008). Higher levels of circulating free T are related to attending more to angry faces (van Honk et al. 1999;Wirth and Schultheiss 2007). In terms of financially-related risk, higher circulating salivary T has been linked to riskier gambling decisions (Stanton et al. 2011). ...
There is no consensus on how masculinity is manifested in our species. Here we argue that masculine displays vary in terms of how rapidly they emerge. The most rapid masculine displays are reflexive, primal, and shared with males of other social primate species. We suggest that these behaviors evolved to protect the individuals and others in his social groups from external threats, such as from large predators or aggressors from other troops. This has led to high testosterone individuals displaying reactive aggression, without substantive assessment about their own vulnerability and risk. In this situation, high testosterone impedes cognitive processing, which may require many more milliseconds than may be available if a threat is imminent and unpredictable. At the other extreme, masculine displays are more performative and strategic. They relate to how status is won, lost, and displayed within the social group. These are the behaviors relative to the intraspecific dominance hierarchy and information within the forebrain may be accessed, such as memory, in order to assess risk. Masculine displays of this type take many milliseconds more time in cognitive processing than the first type. The contrast proposed here is consistent with the fact that high testosterone individuals are prone to display more risky behaviors, and concurrently are less likely to be diagnosed with clinical depression or anxiety. Our analysis provides both an evolutionary and neuroendocrinological explanation for the persistence of masculine traits that have been recognized by sociologists as hegemonic, but not necessarily adaptive in modern social settings.
... A study using the joystick paradigm demonstrated that offenders with psychopathy showed lack of withdrawal tendencies when confronted with angry faces (von Borries et al., 2012). Other research suggested that other people's anger expressions can have positive reinforcing qualities for some people (Wirth & Schultheiss, 2007). Using a circumplex model organized around the two orthogonal dimensions of dominance versus submissiveness and affiliation versus coldness, Wright et al. (2012) showed that antagonism was primarily associated with dominant problems whereas detachment was primarily associated with cold problems, and only to a lesser extent with difficulties with non-assertiveness. ...
Expressions of affect communicate social messages, which trigger approach and withdrawal/avoidance motivational tendencies in the observer. The present study investigated relationships between inter-individual differences in the motivational responses to other people's affect expressions and DSM-5 personality trait domains. State-dependent, transient EEG alpha asymmetry responses provided indicators of the relative activation of withdrawal versus approach motivation in the respective social-emotional contexts. The Personality Inventory for the DSM-5 (PID-5) was used for the assessment of personality traits in a non-clinical sample. Individuals with higher levels of Antagonism showed relative activation of approach versus withdrawal motivation (as indicated by less relative right frontal activation) in response to confrontation with auditory expressions of angry aggression, whereas participants with higher levels of Detachment showed relative activation of withdrawal versus approach motivation (as indicated by greater relative right frontal activation) to the perception of other people's desperate crying.
... 2013; Walther et al., 2016), while cortisol (C) has been shown to increase with age (Karlamangla et al., 2013;Nater et al., 2013;Miller et al., 2016). However, T, as the end product of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis, has been positively related to aggression, dominance, and anger in men, while inverse associations have been shown for depressive and anxiety symptoms (Edinger and Frye, 2005;Wirth and Schultheiss, 2007;Carrier et al., 2015;Walther et al., 2017c). In contrast, higher levels of C, the primary effector of the biological stress response released via the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, have been associated with more depressive and anxious symptoms as well as higher scores for worrying (Ehlert et al., 2001;Takahashi et al., 2005;Mantella et al., 2008), although there is substantial conflicting literature indicating differences between symptoms of anxiety, anxiety disorders, and age as well as sex of examined subjects (Steudte et al., 2011;Yehuda and Seckl, 2011;Hek et al., 2013;Steudte-Schmiedgen et al., 2017). ...
Although aging increases the risk of cognitive and socioemotional deterioration, it has also been shown to be accompanied by an increase in experienced positive emotions and a decrease in negative emotions. Steroid hormones and age-related alterations in secretion patterns have been suggested to play a crucial role in these age-related changes in emotional experience. Importantly, previous studies identified effects of neuroactive hormones on age-related alterations in emotional experience, which vary by sex and depression levels. Therefore, in three independent cross-sectional studies including a total of 776 men, we examined age-related differences in emotional experience and subsequently the moderation effect of steroid hormones. Sample one consisted of 271 self-reporting healthy (SRH) men aged between 40 and 75 years, while sample two comprised 121 men in the identical age range but only including vitally exhausted (VE) men. Sample three included 384 men aged between 25 and 78 years who reported having fathered (FA) at least one child. For the SRH men, age was negatively associated with anxiety symptoms and aggression, while negative trends emerged for depressive symptoms. In VE men, age was negatively associated with depressive symptoms and positively associated with aggression and positive emotions. For FA men, anxiety symptoms and aggression were negatively associated with age. Age trends of steroid hormones and identified moderation effects are reported. However, with adjustment for multiple comparisons, most of the significant associations fade and the reported associations need to be regarded as exploratory starting points for the further investigation of age-related alterations in emotional experience and their relation to steroid secretion. Overall, the results indicate that salivary cortisol might be a moderator of the association between age and symptoms of anxiety for SRH and VE men, while salivary testosterone seems to moderate the association between age and symptoms of anxiety or depression in VE and FA men, respectively. Both hair cortisol and progesterone seem to influence age-related alterations in anger experience. Age-related alterations in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis emerge as promising avenues to further investigate the decrease in experienced negative emotions in aging men.
... In humans, various studies indicate a correlation between testosterone and aggression (Chichinadze et al., 2010;Derntl et al., 2009;Hermans et al., 2008;Mazur, 1995;Wirth and Schultheiss, 2007). However, testosterone studies often differ in their findings as well as in their methods (for reviews and meta-analysis see Archer et al. (2005), Batrinos (2012), Carré et al. (2011)). ...
Animal studies suggest a causal link between testosterone and aggression. However, in human research the exact role of this hormone is still unclear, having been linked to dominance and approach behavior rather than to aggression per se. In a social context, the induction of aggression might be confounded with dominance or status changes, which potentially influence the association between aggression and testosterone. The objective of the current study was to investigate the influence of testosterone on non-social aggression in a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment including 90 healthy male participants. To this end, we developed an innovative paradigm in which participants were provoked by a malfunctioning joystick restraining them from a promised reward. As measures for aggression throughout the task the joystick amplitude was recorded and anger was assessed via emotional self-ratings. Participants reacted to the provocation with a significant shift to more negative emotions and increased implicit aggressive behavior, reflected in the force exerted to pull the joystick following provocation. Importantly, the study demonstrated first evidence for a modulating influence of testosterone on non-social aggression in males: Self-rated anger was significantly elevated in the testosterone group compared to the placebo group as a function of provocation. Testosterone administration did not significantly influence the implicit aggressive response. These findings demonstrate a potentiating effect of testosterone on provocation-related anger in a non-social context. Furthermore, the results highlight the importance of disentangling different components of aggression and characterizing different influencing factors when inferring on hormonal effects.
Understanding emotions in males is crucial given their higher susceptibility to substance use, interpersonal violence, and suicide compared to females. Steroid hormones are assumed to be critical biological factors that affect and modulate emotion-related behaviors, together with psychological and social factors. This review explores whether males‘ abilities to recognize emotions of others and regulate their own emotions are associated with testosterone, cortisol, and their interaction. Higher levels of testosterone were associated with improved recognition and heightened sensitivity to threatening faces. In contrast, higher cortisol levels positively impacted emotion regulation ability. Indirect evidence from neuroimaging research suggested a link between higher testosterone levels and difficulties in cognitive emotion regulation. However, this notion must be investigated in future studies using different emotion regulation strategies and considering social status. The present review contributes to the understanding of how testosterone and cortisol affect psychological well-being and emotional behavior in males.
Objective
A goal of behavioral neuroendocrinology is to understand how basal hormone levels relate to behavior. Studies of human participants sometimes measure self-reported personality traits, in addition to or instead of direct behavioral observation. Although personality traits often predict their respective behaviors, whether personality explains hormone-behavior relationships remains unclear.
Methods
We obtained data from eight previous studies (total N = 985) that examined baseline testosterone and cortisol as predictors of status-relevant behavior (competitiveness, dominance, risk-taking, aggression, affiliation, and social status). We tested whether the previously reported hormone-behavior relationships are mediated by self-reported personality traits (e.g., trait dominance, prestige, extraversion). As a secondary research question, we also tested whether trait dominance moderated the testosterone-behavior relationships.
Results
As expected, self-reported personality traits often predicted status-relevant behaviors, but there was little evidence that traits also correlated with basal testosterone or the testosterone × cortisol interaction. Across all eight studies, personality traits did not significantly mediate hormone-behavior relationships. Indeed, the effect sizes of the hormone-behavior relationships were robust to the inclusion of personality traits as covariates. Further, we did not find strong or consistent evidence that trait dominance moderates the testosterone-behavior association.
Conclusion
Results suggest that basal testosterone and cortisol predict status-related behavior independent of self-reported personality. We discuss how these results may have broader implications for the physiological mechanisms by which testosterone and cortisol influence behavior, a process that could be unconscious and automatic. We also discuss alternative explanations, limitations, and future directions.
Computational models of personality offer a means of bridging the gap between “bottom-up” neuroscience and contemporary individual difference researchers’ efforts to build “top-down” self-report questionnaires. Dynamic models like Atkinson and Birch's Dynamics of Action model (1970), Read and colleagues’ Virtual Personalities model (Read & Miller, 2002; Read et al., 2010), and Revelle and Condon's Cues-Tendencies-Actions (CTA) model (2015) generate the observable between-persons' differences in behavior and effect on which self-report measures are based, from the unobservable within-persons differences on which modern personality theories are premised. Here, we focus on the “CTARST” model, which unites CTA and a reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) simulation. CTARST has been used to simulate, in detail, data from three real-life studies that linked within- and between-person variability: Smillie, Cooper, Wilt, and Revelle (2012), Wilt, Bleidorn, and Revelle (2017), and Wilt, Funkhouser, and Revelle (2011). Results demonstrated that the CTARST model is able to usefully approximate actual data regarding psychological dynamics.
Some evidence suggests that testosterone can increase attentional orientation toward biologically relevant stimuli and increase sustained attention during goal-oriented behaviors. While rare irregular distractors often capture attention involuntarily and distract us away from the task at hand, we hypothesized that testosterone might (1) facilitate attentional orientation to novel distractors that are of potential behavioral relevance and (2) inhibit information processing of distractors that are irrelevant to the task. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the effects of testosterone on distractor processing in a novelty oddball task, during which infrequent target and distractor sounds were interspersed within a series of frequent non-target sounds. Using a double-blind, placebo-controlled within-participant design, we administered a single dose of either testosterone or placebo to 34 healthy male volunteers and compared their electroencephalographic responses to distractors. Increased amplitude of the early (260–310 ms) P3 component—which has been associated with phasic arousal and alertness triggered by novel stimuli—was observed in the testosterone session than in the placebo session. This early-P3 response mediated the effect of testosterone administration on target hit rate during the task. In addition, less α-oscillation suppression—which has been associated with the inhibition of task-irrelevant information processing—was observed in response to distractors later (538–757 ms) in the testosterone session than in the placebo session. These results suggest that testosterone facilitated phasic arousal to novel distractors during the early-latency stage, which might have influenced behavioral performance during the task. Furthermore, testosterone inhibited task-irrelevant information processing during the late-latency stage, which allowed better reorientation of attention back to the primary task. Our findings highlight the role of testosterone in distractor processing, and provide a theoretical basis for treating attention-related behavioral disorders with hormone therapies.
Background
Studies in regard to womens’ neural reactivity to erotic and other positive emotional cues in association with sexual hormones are relatively rare and with findings being rather inconclusive. Concerning the neural reactions towards erotic stimuli, the LPP is seen as the most relevant ERP-component: More positive amplitudes are supposed to reflect larger motivational salience and higher arousal in reaction to the presented stimuli. Therefore, it was expected that the LPP in reaction to erotic pictures would be more pronounced during fertile periods of the menstrual cycle around ovulation, as well as associated with estradiol-levels. A similar pattern was hypothesized to be present with testosterone-levels, whereas no association with progesterone was expected.
Method
N = 35 free-cycling women completed an Erotic picture Stroop task (neutral, positive, and erotic stimuli, with three neutral- and three erotic subcategories) during follicular phase, ovulation and luteal phase, while EEG was recorded. Subjects provided saliva samples in order to determine estradiol-, progesterone-, and testosterone levels at each measuring time, and affective states were assessed using the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS).
Results
LPPs in reaction to erotic-compared to positive- and neutral pictures were larger in every cycle phase. LPPs in reaction to erotic couples were strongest in comparison to every other (sub-) category. During ovulation, higher estradiol-concentrations were associated with lower LPP-amplitudes towards erotic-couples- than to neutral pictures. No effects of progesterone, no direct effect of testosterone, as well as no effects of cycle phase, were evident.
Conclusion
Results partly contradict our hypotheses, as estradiol was expected to be positively associated with LPP during fertile stages. Possible differences between stimulus-entities (words v. pictures) and ideas for further research are being discussed.
SYNOPSIS
Objective. Lower baseline testosterone (T) among men is generally associated with more sympathetic and nurturant responses to infant stimuli. The effect of exposure to infant crying on men’s levels of T, however, is not well understood. The present study aimed to measure men’s T responses to high and low levels of infant crying. Design. Changes in fathers’ (n = 18) and non-fathers’ (n = 28) salivary T levels from baseline were measured in response to caring for an infant simulator programmed to cry often (high-demand condition) or infrequently (low-demand condition) during a 20-min caregiving simulation. Results. Men exposed to low-demand conditions exhibited significant T reductions from baseline, whereas men in high-demand conditions exhibited increases in T. Compared to men who displayed decreases in T following the caregiving simulation, men who displayed increases in T provided less sensitive care. Conclusions. Results suggest a potential role of high levels of crying in provoking physiological reactions among men that may set the stage for hostile or aggressive responses. More research is needed to illuminate contextual factors that contribute to men’s variable responses to infant crying.
We examine whether a male CEO's facial masculinity, measured by facial width‐to‐height ratio (fWHR), predicts the riskiness of his firm. Using the face pictures of 1,162 CEOs in the Execucomp database, we find supporting evidence. Firms with more masculine‐faced CEOs have higher stock return volatility and higher financial leverage and are more acquisitive. Their frequency of acquisitions, the dollar amount spent on acquisitions, and the takeover premium are all higher. We find that more masculine‐faced CEOs' compensation is more sensitive to the risk of the firm. The result is robust when we use AI (artificial intelligence)‐measured fWHR of the CEOs.
Higher testosterone levels have been positively related to a variety of social behaviors and personality traits associated with intrasexual competition. The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of testosterone levels and personality traits such as aggressiveness, competitiveness, and self-esteem on the task of choosing a fighting competitor (a rival) with or without a motivation to fight. In Study 1, a group of 119 men participated in a task for choosing a rival through pictures of men with high-dominant masculinity versus low-dominant masculinity. Participants completed three personality questionnaires and donated two saliva samples (pre-test and post-test sample) to quantify their testosterone levels. We found that the probability of choosing high-dominant masculine men as rivals increased with higher aggressiveness scores. In Study 2, the task of choosing rivals was accompanied by motivations to fight (pictures of women with high or low waist-to-hip ratio [WHR]). In this context, we observed that the probability of choosing dominant masculine men as rivals depended on the WHR of the women. Overall, average levels of post-test testosterone, aggressiveness, and high self-esteem increased the probability to fight for women with low WHR independently of the dominance masculinity of the rivals. Our results indicate that human decisions, in the context of intrasexual competition and mate choice, are regulated by physiological and psychological mechanisms allowing men to increase their biological fitness. We discuss our results in the light of the plasticity of human behavior according to biological and environmental forces.
Testosterone plays an important role in social threat processing. Recent evidence suggests that testosterone administration has socially anxiolytic effects, but it remains unknown whether this involves early vigilance or later, more sustained, processing-stages. We investigated the acute effects of testosterone administration on social threat processing in 19 female patients with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and 19 healthy controls. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during an emotional Stroop task with subliminally presented faces. Testosterone induced qualitative changes in early ERPs (<200ms after stimulus onset) in both groups. An initial testosterone-induced spatial shift reflected a change in the basic processing (N170/VPP) of neutral faces, which was followed by a shift for angry faces suggesting a decrease in early threat bias. These findings suggest that testosterone specifically affects early automatic social information processing. The decreased attentional bias for angry faces explains how testosterone can decrease threat avoidance, which is particularly relevant for SAD.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain was used to compare changes in amygdala activity associated with viewing facial expressions of fear and anger. Pictures of human faces bearing expressions of fear or anger, as well as faces with neutral expressions, were presented to 8 healthy participants. The blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal within the dorsal amygdala was significantly greater to Fear versus Anger, in a direct contrast. Significant BOLD signal changes in the ventral amygdala were observed in contrasts of Fear versus Neutral expressions and, in a more spatially circumscribed region, to Anger versus Neutral expressions. Thus, activity in the amygdala is greater to fearful facial expressions when contrasted with either neutral or angry faces. Furthermore, directly contrasting fear with angry faces highlighted involvement of the dorsal amygdaloid region.
Attentional bias is a central feature of many cognitive theories of psychopathology. One of the most frequent methods of investigating such bias has been an emotional analog of the Stroop task. In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology. The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition. They address the causes and mechanisms underlying the phenomenon, focusing on J. D. Cohen, K. Dunbar, and J. L. McClelland's (1990) parallel distributed processing model.
Research using a refinement of existing measures of mood, the UWIST Mood Adjective Checklist (UMACL), is reviewed. A factor analysis (N = 388), using a validated criterion for assessing the number of factors to be extracted, confirmed that the UMACL measures dimensions of energetic arousal, tense arousal and hedonic tone. Psychometric properties of UMACL scales were satisfactory. Discriminant validity was established by showing that correlations between UMACL scales and demographic and personality variables were small in magnitude, though of theoretical importance. Significant correlations between the arousal scales and psychophysiological measures of autonomic arousal demonstrate concurrent validity. A series of studies shows that the UMACL scales are sensitive to external ‘stressors’. Specific influences on each of the three principal scales have been found. Certain stressors appear to evoke a more general stress syndrome associated with reduced energetic arousal and hedonic tone, and increased tense arousal.
A combination of field and laboratory investigations has revealed that the temporal patterns of testosterone (T) levels in blood can vary markedly among populations and individuals, and even within individuals from one year to the next. Although T is known to regulate reproductive behavior (both sexual and aggressive) and thus could be expected to correlate with mating systems, it is clear that the absolute levels of T in blood are not always indicative of reproductive state. Rather, the pattern and amplitude of change in T levels are far more useful in making predictions about the hormonal basis of mating systems and breeding strategies. In these contexts we present a model that compares the amplitude of change in T level with the degree of parental care shown by individual males. On the basis of data collected from male birds breeding in natural or captive conditions, polygynous males appear less responsive to social environmental cues than are monogamous males. This model indicates that there may be widely different hormonal responses to male-male and male-female interactions and presumably equally plastic neural mechanisms for the transduction of these signals into endocrine secretions. Furthermore, evidence from other vertebrate taxa suggests strongly that the model is applicable to other classes
This paper describes a biosocial model of status in face-to-face groups. It argues that status ranks are allocated among members
of a group through face-to-face interaction and that the allocation process is similar across each primate species, including
humans. Every member of a group signifies its rank through physical or vocal demeanor. For example, behavioral signs of dominant
status include erect posture, glares, eye contact, strutting, and (in humans) assertive speech. Individuals whose behaviors
exhibit dominance show high or rising levels of testosterone compared to those who exhibit deference. Testosterone and dominance
are reciprocally related. The model relies more on research on males than on females. It is proposed as a theory about both
sexes, but with a caution that little is known about sex differences in the relation of hormones to dominance behavior.
The rapid detection of facial expressions of anger or threat has obvious adaptive value. In this study, we examined the efficiency of facial processing by means of a visual search task. Participants searched displays of schematic faces and were required to determine whether the faces displayed were all the same or whether one was different. Four main results were found: (1) When displays contained the same faces, people were slower in detecting the absence of a discrepant face when the faces displayed angry (or sad/angry) rather than happy expressions. (2) When displays contained a discrepant face people were faster in detecting this when the discrepant face displayed an angry rather than a happy expression. (3) Neither of these patterns for same and different displays was apparent when face displays were inverted, or when just the mouth was presented in isolation. (4) The search slopes for angry targets were significantly lower than for happy targets. These results suggest that detection of angry facial expressions is fast and efficient, although does not "pop-out" in the traditional sense.
Converging data suggest that human facial behavior has an evolutionary basis. Combining these data with Seligman's preparedness theory, it was predicted that facial expressions of anger should be more readily associated with aversive events than should expressions of happiness. Two experiments involving differential electrodermal conditioning to pictures of faces, with electric shock as the unconditioned stimulus, were performed. In the first experiment, the subjects were exposed to two pictures of the same person, one with an angry and one with a happy expression. For half of the subjects, the shock followed the angry face, and for the other half, it followed the happy face. In the second experiment, three groups of subjects differentiated between pictures of male and female faces, both showing angry, neutral, and happy expressions. Responses to angry conditioned stimuli showed significant resistance to extinction in both experiments, with a larger effect in Experiment 2. Responses to happy or neutral conditioned stimuli, on the other hand, extinguished immediately when the shock was withheld. The results are related to conditioning to phobic stimuli and to the preparedness theory.
Gonadal steroids profoundly influence several brain functions and are apparently responsible for gender-specific differences in the regulation of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) secretions. In this study, we examined the so-called "activational" effects of gonadal steroids on the glucocorticoid-mediated regulation of the gene transcription of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) and corticosteroid receptors in brain areas of relevance for the control of pituitary-adrenal secretion. The efficacy of adrenalectomy (ADX) and chronic treatment with high doses of corticosterone (B) to regulate the gene transcription of CRH and corticosteroid receptors in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) and hippocampus was studied in male and female rats under the conditions of deprivation of gonadectomy (GDX) and replacement with different gonadal steroids, such as estradiol (E2), progesterone (P), and dihydrotestosterone (DHT). In both sexes, ADX alone or in combination with GDX increased, and B treatment suppressed, the steady-state levels of CRH and corticosteroid receptor mRNAs, whereas GDX alone failed to affect any of the parameters studied. Administration of gonadal hormones to steroid-deprived (ADX/GDX) animals partially attenuated the upregulation of mRNAs encoding corticosteroid receptors in the hippocampus. Supplementation with gonadal steroids modified the effects of B on the gene transcription of CRH and corticosteroid receptors. Whereas P alone or in combination with E2 counteracted the B-induced downregulation of GR and CRH gene transcription in females, DHT and E2 administration further potentiated the effects of B on these parameters in a sex-specific manner. Taken together, the results indicate that gonadal steroids have minor influence on MR, GR, and CRH gene transcription under basal conditions, exert "glucocorticoid-like" effects on the transcription of corticosteroid receptors in the hippocampus of steroid-deprived animals, and interact with glucocorticoid-mediated mechanisms of regulation in the HPA axis through gender-specific "buffering" and "potentiating" effects.
Effects of punishment and personality on a phylogenetically old form of knowledge acquisition, procedural learning, were studied to test J. A. Gray's 1970, 1987, 1991) theory of anxiety. Broad measures of personality (extraversion, E.; neuroticism, N; and psychoticism, P) and specific measures of trait anxiety (Anx) and impulsivity (Imp) were taken. Punishment led to response invigoration, reducing reaction time latency, but this was not related to personality. A negative correlation of P and learning was observed in both punishment and control conditions. In support of Gray's theory, high Anx improved learning under punishment (and impaired learning under control), and low Anx improved learning under control (and impaired learning under punishment). These data are contrasted with H.J. Eysenck's (1967) arousal theory of personality. Results point to a new behavioral tool with which researchers can explore further the interaction of reinforcement, arousal, and personality.
Concentrations of physiological response variables fluctuate over time. The present study describes within-day and seasonal fluctuations for total cholesterol, dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEA-S), hemoglobin A(1c) (HbA(1c)), IgA, prolactin, and free testosterone in blood, and estimates within- (CV(i)) and between-subject (CV(g)) CVs for healthy women. In addition, the index of individuality, prediction intervals, and power calculations were derived.
A total of 21 healthy female subjects participated in the study. Using a random effects analysis of variance, we estimated CV(g) and total within-subject variation (CV(ti)), i.e., the combined within-subject and analytical variation, from logarithmically transformed data. Analytical variation was subtracted from CV(ti) to give CV(i). CV(i) was estimated from samples taken monthly during 1 year (CV(iy)), weekly during 1 month (CV(im)), and six times within 1 day (CV(id)).
A cyclic seasonal variation was demonstrated for total cholesterol, DHEA-S, HbA(1c), prolactin, and free testosterone. Within-day variation was shown for prolactin and free testosterone. The overall mean values for the group and the variability (CV(iy) and CV(g)) were: 5.1 mmol/L, 13% [corrected], and 12% [corrected] for total cholesterol; 6.6 micromol/L, 20% [corrected], and 49% [corrected] for DHEA-S; 30% [corrected], 7.0% [corrected], and 7.5% [corrected] for HbA(1c)/hemoglobin(total); 2.1 g/L, 5.9%, and 13% for IgA; 136 mIU/L, 58% [corrected], and 63% [corrected] for prolactin; and 5.4 pmol/L, 55% [corrected], and 68% [corrected] for free testosterone.
Collecting samples at specific hours of the day or times of the year may reduce high biological variation. Alternatively, the number of individuals may be increased and a paired study design chosen to obtain adequate statistical power.
Testosterone (T) and pregnane neurosteroids can enhance conditioned place preference (CPP). The present experiment examined CPP produced by T and its androgenic metabolite dihydrotestosterone (DHT) and 3alpha-Androstanediol (3alpha-diol; an androstane neurosteroid). Administration of 3alpha-diol (>DHT>T) to intact male Long-Evans rats, 1.0 mg daily for six days, 30 min prior to exposure to the non-preferred side of the CPP chamber significantly increased preference for the non-preferred side of the chamber compared to that seen in home cage controls. Levels of circulating 3alpha-diol were increased significantly in 3alpha-diol>DHT>T-administered rats, compared to rats that had vehicle administered or androgen-administration discontinued. Androgen administration decreased seminal vesicle weight and intrahypothalamic androgen receptor (AR) binding compared to that seen in rats that had vehicle administered or androgen-administration discontinued. Testosterone, DHT, and 3alpha-diol decreased GABA-stimulated chloride influx in cortical synaptoneurosomes, and muscimol binding in the hippocampus compared to that seen in rats with vehicle administered or that had androgen-administration discontinued. These data indicate that administration of 3alpha-diol is more effective at enhancing CPP and increasing circulating 3alpha-diol levels than is DHT or T administration, and that all of the androgen regimens employed decreased peripheral and hypothalamic androgen receptor binding and cortical and hippocampal GABA(A) receptor function. Hence, whether the effects of 3 alpha-diol on CPP are mediated by differential actions at ARs or GABA(A) receptors in particular brain regions needs to be determined.
Hormones are often regarded as one independent variable responsible for the behavior (the dependent variable) of an individual. Hormones are seen as the physiological mechanism underlying behavior and are treated as a “cause” of certain behavioral patterns—“behavioral patterns,” because hormonal levels are not viewed as stimuli that release specific fixed action patterns but as the regulators of motivational states that increase or decrease the probabilities of specific classes of response to environmental stimuli.
Three studies investigated whether individuals preferentially allocate attention to the spatial location of threatening faces presented outside awareness. Pairs of face stimuli were briefly displayed and masked in a modified version of the dot-probe task. Each face pair consisted of an emotional (threat or happy) and neutral face. The hypothesis that preattentive processing of threat results in attention being oriented towards its location was supported in Experiments 1 and 3. In both studies, this effect was most apparent in the left visual field, suggestive of right hemisphere involvement. However, in Experiment 2 where awareness of the faces was less restricted (i.e. marginal threshold conditions), preattentive capture of attention by threat was not evident. There was evidence from Experiment 3 that the tendency to orient attention towards masked threat faces was greater in high than low trait anxious individuals.
The human face is an evolved adaptation for social communication. This implies that humans are genetically prepared to produce facial gestures that are automatically decoded by observers. Psychophysiological data demonstrate that humans respond automatically with their facial muscles, with autonomic responses, and with specific regional brain activation of the amygdala when exposed to emotionally expressive faces. Attention is preferentially and automatically oriented toward facial threat. Neuropsychological data, as well as a rapidly expanding brain-imaging literature, implicate the amygdala as a central structure for responding to negative emotional faces, and particularly to fearful ones. However, the amygdala may not be specialized for processing emotional faces, but may instead respond to faces because they provide important information for the defense appraisal that is its primary responsibility.
Three studies considered whether trial lawyers, in their hormones and their language, might be regarded as blue-collar workers of the legal system. Study 1 found that lawyers as a group had testosterone levels similar to other white-collar workers and lower than blue-collar workers. Study 2 found that male and female trial lawyers had testosterone levels higher than nontrial lawyers of the same gender; the difference between lawyer types was approximately the same as the difference between blue- and white-collar workers. Study 3 found that trial lawyers used fewer cognitive mechanisms than did appellate lawyers in oral arguments before the Supreme Court. High levels of testosterone are associated with energy, dominance, persistence, combativeness, and focused attention, qualities that are useful both in trial lawyering and blue-collar work.
We conducted two studies (Ns=52 and 60) to test the notion that the incentive salience of facial expressions of emotion (FEE) is a joint function of
perceivers’ implicit needs for power and affiliation and the FEE’s meaning as a dominance or affiliation signal. We used a
variant of the dot-probe task (Mogg & Bradley, 1999a) to measure attentional orienting. Joy, anger, surprise, and neutral
FEEs were presented for 12, 116, and 231ms with backward masking. Implicit motives were assessed with a Picture Story Exercise.
We found that power-motivated individuals orient their attention towards faces signaling low dominance, but away from faces
that signal high dominance, and (b) that affiliation-motivated individuals show vigilance for faces signaling low affiliation
(rejection) and, to a lesser extent, orient attention towards faces signaling high affiliation (acceptance).
The abuse of androgens may be related to their ability to produce positive, hedonic interoceptive effects. Conditioned Place Preference (CPP) has been used in many experiments to examine hedonic effects of drugs. This review is focused on studies from our laboratory that utilized CPP to examine potential positive hedonic effects of testosterone (T), and its androgenic metabolite dihydrotestosterone (DHT), and its metabolite 3α-androstanediol (3α-diol). We hypothesized that administration of a high concentration of 3α-diol would produce a CPP, pharmacological concentrations of plasma androgens, and alter androgen receptors (AR) and the function of GABAA/benzodiazepine receptor complexes (GBR). In our studies, we observed that systemic 3α-diol (1.0 mg/kg) prior to exposure to the non-preferred side of a CPP chamber significantly increased preference for the non-preferred side of the chamber compared to baseline preference and homecage controls. Furthermore, administration of T, DHT, or 3α-diol increased levels of these androgens, decreased ARs (decreased seminal vesicle weight and intrahypothalamic AR) and GBR function (decreased GABA-stimulated chloride influx in cortical synaptoneurosomes, and muscimol binding in the hippocampus compared to control groups). With systemic administration of 3α-diol that enhanced CPP, concentrations of 3α-diol were increased in the nucleus accumbens (NA). Central implants of T, DHT, or 3α-diol to the NA also produced a CPP compared to baseline preference and vehicle controls. These data indicate that systemic 3α-diol is more effective at enhancing CPP and increasing circulating 3α-diol levels than is T or DHT and that central administration of 3α-diol to the NA can condition a place preference. These findings indicate that 3α-diol produces positive hedonic effects and suggest that T’s variable effects on CPP may be due in part to T’s metabolism to 3α-diol.
Attentional biases for threat were examined in a non-clinical sample (N=60), with each participant tested on both the modified Stroop colour-naming and dot probe tasks. Three groups were selected on the basis of trait anxiety and social desirability scale (SDS) scores: “low anxiety” (LA: low trait, low SDS), “repressor” (REP: low trait, high SDS) and “high anxiety” (HA: high trait, low SDS). Results from the colour-naming task suggested that high levels of defensiveness (in combination with low trait anxiety) were associated with greater avoidance of threat. The REP group showed less interference in colour-naming threat than neutral words; whereas the HA group showed increased interference due to threat words. On the dot probe task, there was a general tendency for this non-clinical sample as a whole to show avoidance of social threat relative to neutral words, but there was no bias for physical threat words. Avoidance of social threat was significant only within the REP group. No relationships were found between the measures of cognitive bias from the two tasks, suggesting different underlying mechanisms. Results are discussed in relation to previous findings and theoretical views of the effects of anxiety and defensiveness on the processing of threat.
The ‘challenge hypothesis’ posits that variation in male testosterone levels is more closely associated with aggression in reproductive contexts than it is with changes in reproductive physiology. Numerous bird studies support this idea, but few tests have been conducted with primates. We conducted behavioural observations and noninvasive hormone sampling of 11 male chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, in the Kanyawara study site, Kibale National Park, to test predictions of the challenge hypothesis. Results indicated that adult male chimpanzees showed significant testosterone increases during periods when parous females showed maximally tumescent sexual swellings. These periods were also marked by increased rates of male aggression. Male testosterone levels did not increase in the presence of maximally tumescent nulliparous females. Such females are less attractive to males: they are not mate-guarded, nor do rates of male aggression increase when they are swelling. Male chimpanzees copulate with parous and nulliparous females at similar rates, however, suggesting that testosterone increases in the presence of cycling parous females are associated with aggression rather than sexual behaviour. High-ranking chimpanzees were more aggressive than low-ranking males and produced higher levels of urinary testosterone. Thus, the predictions of the challenge hypothesis were generally upheld. This suggests that the hypothesis may have wider applicability among primates, including humans.
Measures of testosterone among women are potentially useful in behavioral research, but information is needed on how much error is introduced by variability across the menstrual cycle. Morning and evening salivary testosterone concentrations were measured at weekly intervals across one menstrual cycle in each of 22 women, using the luteinizing hormone surge to mark midcycle. Menstrual cycles were statistically significant but smaller than daily cycles or individual differences. Menstrual cycle effects can be ignored in most research relating psychological and behavioral variables to individual differences in testosterone.
Salivary testosterone measurements would appear to be useful in behavioral research, where subjects are often reluctant to provide serum samples. The usefulness of salivary measurements depends upon their reliability, however, which was the focus of the present investigation. In four studies, 270 male and 175 female subjects collected saliva samples at times ranging from 30 min to 8 weeks apart. Subjects collected samples on at least two days, at time of awakening, midmorning, late afternoon, and late evening. Mean testosterone concentration dropped about 50% from morning to evening for both sexes, with largest drops early in the day. Mean reliability was r = .64 across two days and r = .52 across seven-eight weeks. Menstrual cycle effects were negligible. Reliability can be increased by using more than one measurement, and it is probably desirable to combine measurements taken several weeks apart. Salivary assays offer a practical way of measuring testosterone in free-ranging subjects outside the laboratory.
The distribution of cells that express mRNA encoding the androgen (AR) and estrogen (ER) receptors was examined in adult male and female rats by using in situ hybridization. Specific labeling appeared to be largely, if not entirely, localized to neurons. AR and ER mRNA-containing neurons were widely distributed in the rat brain, with the greatest densities of cells in the hypothalamus, and in regions of the telencephalon that provide strong inputs in the medial preoptic and ventromedial nuclei, each of which is thought to play a key role in mediating the hormonal control of copulatory behavior, as well as in the lateral septal nucleus, the medial and cortical nuclei of the amygdala, the amygdalohippocampal area, and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Heavily labeled ER mRNA-containing cells were found in regions known to be involved in the neural control of gonadotropin release, such as the anteroventral periventricular and the arcuate nuclei, but only a moderate density of labeling for AR mRNA was found over these nuclei. In addition, clearly labeled cells were found in regions with widespread connections throughout the brain, including the lateral hypothalamus, intralaminar thalamic nuclei, and deep layers of the cerebral cortex, suggesting that AR and ER may modulate a wide variety of neural functions. Each part of Ammon's horn contained AR mRNA-containing cells, as did both parts of the subiculum, but ER mRNA appeared to be less abundant in the hippocampal formation. Moreover, AR and ER mRNA-containing cells were also found in olfactory regions of the cortex and in both the main and accessory olfactory bulbs. AR and ER may modulate nonolfactory sensory information as well since labeled cells were found in regions involved in the central relay of somatosensory information, including the mesencephalic nucleus of the trigeminal nerve, the ventral thalamic nuclear group, and the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. Furthermore, heavily labeled AR mRNA-containing cells were found in the vestibular nuclei, the cochlear nuclei, the medial geniculate nucleus, and the nucleus of the lateral lemniscus, which suggests that androgens may alter the central relay of vestibular and auditory information as well. However, of all the regions involved in sensory processing, the heaviest labeling for AR and ER mRNA was found in areas that relay visceral sensory information such as the nucleus of the solitary tract, the area postrema, and the subfornical organ. We did not detect ER mRNA in brainstem somatic motoneurons, but clearly labeled AR mRNA-containing cells were found in motor nuclei associated with the fifth, seventh, tenth, and twelfth cranial nerves. Similarly, spinal motoneurons contained AR but not ER mRNA.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Assessment of ovarian activity based on saliva samples has proven particularly useful in studies of women in well-developed countries and is potentially of even greater value in women of lower socioeconomic status in Third World countries. Assay techniques suitable for measuring low concentrations of steroids in saliva have become available only recently, so data derived from salivary sampling regimens are far less extensive than those based on plasma or urinary sampling procedures. Collecting saliva is an attractive alternative to the more conventional procedures because of the ease of frequent collection and freedom from religious and social constraints. Simple, direct assays for salivary progesterone have been established, but those for estradiol require considerably more research before becoming useful in routine practice. Predicting ovulation with data derived from saliva sampling awaits the development of more suitable assays for salivary estradiol.
SOME difficulties in clinical studies of endocrine function based on plasma sampling regimens include time-consuming venipuncture and measurement of the “total” rather than the “free” biologically active fraction in plasma. Simple methods for determining plasma free steroids have not yet been developed, and most current procedures involve technically demanding ultrafiltration or equilibrium dialysis. In this context measurement of steroids in saliva is attractive. Steroid concentrations in saliva are independent of flow rate and reflect those in the free fraction in plasma. Recent improvements in immunoassay techniques have allowed development of simple, high output assays for salivary steroids which are well suited for routine use. Since saliva samples can be collected at frequent intervals by both adults and children, they facilitate short term dynamic tests, pharmacokinetic analyses, and studies of chronobiological changes. Problems of viscosity, which restrict processing of freshly collected saliva, m...
Androgens are often associated with assertive behavior; under what circumstances is this reflected in higher dominance rank? In this study of coresidential college women, androgens (total testosterone, free testosterone, and androstenedione) and estradiol were positively correlated with high self-regard in women (as measured by the degree to which subjects over-ranked themselves in a peer-ranking task) and with infrequent smiling, a behavior that has been associated with dominance in previous studies. Androgens and estradiol were also positively correlated with number of sexual partners. The behaviors engendered by these hormones are often positively correlated with high dominance rank, at least in males. In this population, however, high rank (as judged by peer assessments) was negatively correlated with androgens, particularly androstenedione, and showed a negative trend with estradiol as well. One possible interpretation of these findings is suggested by an evolutionary perspective that sees different routes to status among women who compete for resources directly and women who obtain resources through investing males.
Attentional biases were assessed with a probe detection task in anxious (N = 17), depressed (N = 17) and normal control (N = 15) subjects. Word pairs were presented visually, with a dot probe following one word of each pair. Allocation of attention to the spatial position of the words was determined from response latencies to the probes. Half the word pairs were presented supraliminally, half subliminally. The anxious and depressed groups showed an attentional bias towards supraliminal negative words, in comparison with normal controls. The depressed group unexpectedly showed greater vigilance for supraliminal anxiety-relevant words than the anxious group. The anxious group shifted their attention towards the spatial location of negative words presented subliminally. The results support the hypothesis of an anxiety-related bias in preconscious processes.
Attentional biases for threat stimuli were assessed in high and low trait anxious subjects (n = 66) using a probe detection task. To examine the effects of trait anxiety and situational stressors, each subject was tested three times: Under no stress, laboratory-induced stress, and examination-induced stress. To evaluate the role of awareness, half the word stimuli were presented very briefly (14 msec) and masked, and the other half were presented for 500 msec without a mask. Results showed that high trait anxious subjects under exam stress showed an attentional bias towards unmasked threat stimuli compared with low trait subjects. This effect was not found under lab-induced stress, suggesting that the attentional bias for unmasked threat in high trait subjects may be a function of a prolonged stressor, rather than a transient increase in state anxiety. The results from the masked exposure condition were not predicted; high trait anxious subjects shifted attention towards the spatial location of threat words despite lack of awareness of their lexical content, but this bias was only apparent in the no-stress condition. The results are discussed in relation to recent cognitive theories of anxiety.
Sex steroids are known to influence dominance relationships in cattle. This effect seems due to a reduction of fear in response to conspecifics. In order to determine if gonadal steroid can also modulate fear reactions in nonsocial situations, testosterone-treated heifers were exposed to various events reported to elicit fear in cattle. The experimental subjects received daily im injections of testosterone propionate (0.60 mg/kg body wt) for 100 days while controls received the same volume of the vehicle. In a first experiment, the influence of testosterone treatment on behavioral reactions of animals was studied. Treated heifers were much less fearful than controls: they were less reactive to an unfamiliar environment or to a novel object, and they were also less disturbed by a surprising event. In a second experiment, the effects of androgen treatment on cardiac and adrenal responses were evaluated in another group of subjects placed in the same situations. Whereas heart rates after the fear-eliciting events never differed between groups, the increase in cortisol levels was always lower in treated heifers than that in controls in response to human approach, to a surprising event, and to fear conditioning. Furthermore, after stimulation of the adrenal cortex by ACTH administration, the increase in cortisol levels was twice as great in controls than in treated heifers. Thus, prolonged androgen treatment reduces fearfulness in cattle, at least in some situations. Possible mechanisms by which testosterone influences fear-related behaviors are proposed.
Following damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, humans develop a defect in real-life decision-making, which contrasts with otherwise normal intellectual functions. Currently, there is no neuropsychological probe to detect in the laboratory, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms responsible for this defect have resisted explanation. Here, using a novel task which simulates real-life decision-making in the way it factors uncertainty of premises and outcomes, as well as reward and punishment, we find that prefrontal patients, unlike controls, are oblivious to the future consequences of their actions, and seem to be guided by immediate prospects only. This finding offers, for the first time, the possibility of detecting these patients' elusive impairment in the laboratory, measuring it, and investigating its possible causes.
Attentional bias is a central feature of many cognitive theories of psychopathology. One of the most frequent methods of investigating such bias has been an emotional analog of the Stroop task. In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology. The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition. They address the causes and mechanisms underlying the phenomenon, focusing on J.D. Cohen, K. Dunbar, and J.L. McClelland's (1990) parallel distributed processing model.
Fifty-eight normal cycle, healthy women were confronted with an aversive, anger-provoking situation in the laboratory. Eighteen women were tested in their follicular phase. A further 40 women were tested in the premenstrual phase, half of whom reported suffering from complaints of premenstrual emotional lability and irritation, the other half reported being without premenstrual problems. Apart from a strong effect of emotion induction on cardiovascular arousal and anger-related moods in the follicular and premenstrual groups, a premenstrual phase effect was also demonstrated, with premenstrual women showing evidence of being more affected by the manipulations on systolic blood pressure and intensity of angry behaviour during anger provocation. Furthermore, some differences were found between those subjects who reported suffering from premenstrual complaints and those free of such complaints, among the most interesting ones being differences in cortisol level preceding the experimental session, in intensity of angry behaviour, and in report of anger intensity at debriefing. The study indicates that the premenstrual phase may have the effect of making women more susceptible to responding emotionally to negative life events.
In this review we discuss evidence indicating the existence of specific binding receptor sites for progesterone (P), estrogen (E), and testosterone (T)