Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (22 page)

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Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

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BOOK: Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
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just before noon, when members were gathering for lunch. The researcher waved a handful of cash, asked to see someone in charge, and explained that she would pay $75 for saliva samples from a group of twenty members. When the members heard this, volunteers gathered quickly. A leader in one fraternity listened to what my assistant had to say and then shouted out, "Hey, guys, want to spit for a keg?!" We measured testosterone in the saliva samples and related it to other characteristics of the fraternities.
Fraternities with lower mean testosterone levels had a calm and polite atmosphere, responded quickly to the visitor, made her feel at home, and considered the legitimacy of her request. The president of one asked the researcher for a telephone number he could call for official verification of what she had told him. On the other hand, the fraternities with higher average testosterone levels were rambunctious. They had more chaotic surroundings, were less gracious toward the visitor, left her standing alone, and were interested in getting the money, not in discussing the experiment. One high-testosterone fraternity had wrecked furniture in the living room, and the housemother volunteered that "the house is only standing because it's made of concrete and steel." Members at another "animal house" were crude, rude, and half dressed, and after her visit there, the researcher wrote, "I felt like I was being thrown to the lions." Not all the high-testosterone fraternities were so extreme, but there were consistent differences in manners and friendliness between the high and low groups at both universities. When we examined yearbook and chapter room photographs of the members, we found twice as many smiling in the lowest-as in the highest-testosterone fraternities. At one of the universities, the higher-testosterone fraternities had more parties, worse grades, and fewer community service activities.
Results from the fraternities suggest that testosterone does not work quite the same way in groups as it does in individuals. In the fraternities, small differences in testosterone seemed to produce large differences in behavior, and there may be something special about how the testosterone adds up among members of a group. The total group effect of testosterone may be more than the sum of the effects in all the individuals separately. This could happen as individual members talk with each other, reinforce each other's ideas, and bring out behavior from each
 
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other that would not appear under other conditions. A high-testosterone fraternity man could be more rambunctious when he is with a high-testosterone friend than when he is visiting his grandparents.
The "fraternity" effect may hold true for other young male animals. Animal-behavior experts suspect that rambunctious elephant fraternities resulted from a South African wildlife management program. Culling operations in Kruger National Park made orphans of many young elephants. Beginning in 1978, game wardens moved about fifteen hundred of these orphans, including six hundred males, to parks and private reserves to establish elephant populations. Elephants in the wild live in tight-knit mixed-age groups, but these relocated young elephants had to live without guidance from responsible adults. In natural herds, older elephants teach younger ones how they are supposed to behave, and older bulls have the particular responsibility for keeping young males under control during musth, when their testosterone levels peak. Some of the relocated young males began to go into musth at age twenty, instead of the normal age thirty, and they stayed in musth for as long as three months, instead of the normal few days. Without adult supervision, they started getting into trouble. One of the things they did was kill white rhinos, apparently for sport. Further endangering an already endangered species was not what the wildlife managers wanted, and they quickly made plans to bring some adult elephants, including a few forty-year-old bulls, into the new herds. Kruger Park has quit culling older elephants and now relocates elephants in family groups.
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Young animals, including young human animals, tend to be more rambunctious than old ones. In general, the young have higher levels of testosterone than their elders, and testosterone may also affect younger people more because they have had fewer years to become civilized and to learn self-control. Many of the inmates in our prison studies were in their teens, and one of the most violent rapists was only fourteen years old. Fortunately, his was an exceptional case. Many juvenile delinquents are convicted of status offenses, such as running away from home, skipping school, smoking cigarettes, getting drunk, or having sex.
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These are called status offenses because they are offenses only when committed by minors, who do not yet have adult status. In children and adolescents, testosterone is related particularly to status offenses and to aggressive reactions to provocation and restriction.
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Even small children can be rambunctious and badly behaved, sometimes without any apparent provocation. Everyone who has been around children knows that some children are harder to handle than others, and that a few are almost impossible to manage. People who have not spent much time with children sometimes blame parents entirely for their children's misbehavior. It is true that not all parents are good parents, but it is also true that some good parents have to work a whole lot harder than other good parents. Research indicates that hormones probably play a part in making it easy or difficult to raise a particular child. If hormones are related to adults' behavior, it should not be surprising to find that they are also related to children's behavior.
Children do not have much testosterone, but they have enough to measure. Studies of grade-school children show that those with higher levels of testosterone have more learning disabilities and behavior problems.
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The effect may appear even earlier. In an exploratory study, I found that the highest-testosterone child in a day care center was a little girl whom her teachers described as likely to "hit for no reason." We are continuing to examine testosterone levels of young children in day care centers and also of children in the same family. Two of our early subjects, aged two and four, were the sons of one of my students, who told me that the younger one behaved much worse than the older one. We assayed saliva samples and found that the younger one was, as his father had suspected, higher in testosterone.
In two other studies concerning testosterone and behavior in children, we found similar patterns. One study compared five- to eleven-year-olds from a psychiatric group of boys having disruptive behavior disorders with a control group of boys,
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and the other study focused on normal boys and girls ranging in age from three to twelve.
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The first study suggested that testosterone may be a useful biological marker for children at risk for disruptive behavior disorders. Among older boys, testosterone levels were higher in the psychiatric group than in the normal group. Testosterone was associated with withdrawal and aggression, especially among older boys, and low social involvement in activities, especially among younger boys. We found it interesting that the more intelligent boys seemed less adversely affected by high testosterone levels than the less intelligent ones. The second study indicated that high testosterone is associated with moodiness and low levels of
 
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attachment in normal boys and girls. It also indicated that testosterone is related to independent and unsociable behavior in very young children, and that this relation is reduced by the approach and onset of adolescence.
Every person has his or her own natural average level of testosterone. Some people increase their levels by taking testosterone or steroids, which include testosterone, to make themselves stronger, more athletic, or better looking. Testosterone is a Class III controlled substance in the United States, illegal to get without a prescription. Women may wonder why the government has not declared men, who are loaded up with natural testosterone, controlled substances, too. Nevertheless, the only people whose hormones get much public attention are athletes and bodybuilders who use steroids. The behavior of most of these people does not change much, as indicated by a number of studies.
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However, steroid users sometimes do experience uncontrollable rage, which the press calls "'roid rage." One of my students, who was naturally high in testosterone and took additional steroids to increase his strength, said it was hard for him to control his anger when someone cut him off in traffic. He had an inherent tendency to react impulsively, and steroids magnified the tendency. I heard a similar story from an older woman whose hormone-replacement therapy included a small dose of testosterone. She said, "I felt really good unless someone tried to give me a hard time about something. Then I could feel my face getting hot and my vocal cords would tighten up so that I couldn't yell. That would make me even madder. After a couple of times, I wondered if the problem was my hormones. I cut the dose in half and everything was fine. Now I understand men a little better."
Winning and Losing
What I know about testosterone and violence and rambunctious behavior leads me to believe that the testosterone comes first, and rambunctious behavior follows. The situation is less clear-cut with winning and losing. When I tell people about my work, often the first thing they say is, "Isn't it like the chicken and the egg? How do you know which comes first? Does testosterone make you fight, or does fighting make you have more testosterone?" The short answer is that testosterone
 
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comes first. We inherit our testosterone level, just as we inherit our height, body build, eye color, cholesterol level, and other characteristics. Testosterone is part of the body, the physical background out of which we think and act.
But there is also a longer answer, which is that the effect goes both ways. Each of us has an average testosterone level, which remains about the same over the long term, but like our blood pressure, it is subject to short-term fluctuations that follow our physical and emotional ups and downs. Testosterone appears to be most sensitive to success and failure in dealing with other people, which is consistent with the fact that it evolved out of struggles for dominance among our ancestors.
Researchers have learned a great deal about testosterone changes in people in recent years, although animal studies began around 1960. In early experiments with rats and mice, scientists found that male aggression was related to testosterone and could be reduced by castration. This work was extended to monkeys, where it was found that testosterone led to success in fighting, and that success in fighting led to increases in testosterone. As I learned from psychologist Irwin Bernstein at the Yerkes field station, when two male monkeys fight, testosterone rises in the winner and drops in the loser.
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It is not clear why this happens, but it probably helps get the animal into the frame of mind to pick the right opponent for his next fight. When he has won, he should know he is in a good position to fight someone as strong or even stronger next time. When he has lost, he should lower his expectations and fight a weaker monkey next time. Testosterone in some female animals is also related to fighting,
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but there has been no research on testosterone changes associated with winning and losing in females.
Strong competition, where much is at stake, can change the body, and in many animals the change is dramatic. Among cichlid fish in Lake Tanganyika in Africa, males who defeat their competitors produce a bright coat, more brain cells, and more testosterone and sperm. Males who are defeated become submissive. Their coat becomes drab, their brain shrinks, their testicles wither, and they swim away into ignominy.
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When male snakes fight, the outcome affects them greatly. Male rattlesnakes fight by rearing up, entwining their necks, and forcing their opponents to the ground, in a kind of disembodied arm wrestling.
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The loser avoids further fighting, slinks away, and hesitates
 
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to approach females and mate. The snake's cortisol level rises sharply after he loses, which probably reduces the testosterone level, though too few people study testosterone in snakes for us to know for certain what happens.
Winning and losing also affects human testosterone levels. Going to prison is one kind of losing. In one of our prison studies, we took saliva samples from thirty young inmates who were serving three-month sentences in a program modeled on military boot camp. We measured their testosterone when they entered prison and at the end of each month.
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Their testosterone dropped to a low after one month and gradually increased back to the initial level. The drop may have occurred the first day, when inmates' heads were shaved, their clothes were taken away from them, and the guards shouted into their faces and called them scum. The experience is in ways more humiliating than losing a fight, and inmates often break down and cry. Similar changes in testosterone occurs among the young lieutenants in the Army's basic officer training course.
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Strictly speaking, basic training is not prison, but it has much in common with the prison boot camp program, and it has similar effects on testosterone.
I think testosterone probably increases when inmates are released from prison, though I have been unwilling to approach newly released criminals on the street and ask them to spit. I found some relevant data, however, without taking any personal risks. When the American hostages were released in 1980 after spending a year and a half as prisoners in Iran, testosterone measures were part of medical examinations for the men. Their measures during the first three days of freedom dropped from high to medium, suggesting that their testosterone levels had peaked around the time of their release and were returning to more normal levels.
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Human sports contests are like animal fights, in that one person wins and the other loses. The feelings around these contests are strongthe victory is sweet and the loss is bitterand testosterone may be behind these feelings. Tennis players increase in testosterone when they win a tournament and drop when they lose; they also increase in testosterone just before a match, as if in preparation.
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Even in an intellectual game like chess, testosterone levels drop when players lose.
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On the other hand, the psychological boost of winning at chess

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