Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (23 page)

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can raise testosterone levels. The chess findings make it clear that mental as well as physical aspects of winning and losing influence hormonal changes. There is a great deal more to be learned about the effects of victory and defeat on testosterone. I would like to have data on boxing, which may be the modern sporting equivalent to the age-old one-on-one battle for dominance.

The pattern of changing testosterone, rising with anger and dropping with defeat, leads to questions about how testosterone helps people when they fight. Testosterone is related not only to strength and energy but also to concentration and confidence, both important psychological factors when it comes to winning fights. Someone going into a fight should have body, mind, and emotions working together and be confident, as were Henry V before the battle of Agincourt and Patton before his North Africa tank battles in World War II. Confidence has the double effect of rallying supporters and rattling opponents. When Steven Potter said, ''The first muscle tensed is the first point gained," he was talking about making an opponent feel nervous and off balance. Men who abuse their wives often show a decline in heart rate when an argument starts, a sign they are absorbing information and calculating what to do next.
²⁹Testosterone may help wife abusers, just as it helps heroic soldiers, concentrate on the goal at hand. By thinking only about what he wants and not about what his wife wants, the abuser avoids the trap of "playing the other person's ball game."

Just watching a contest is often enough to affect one's testosterone level. Fans in the audience get excited, and when their team wins they bask in reflected glory and say, "We won, we're great!" When a team loses, the fans get angry and depressed and say, "They lost. They made us look bad, the bums!" If fans identify with the players, their testosterone should change just as it changes in the players. We tested this idea by collecting saliva samples from fans before and after sports events.
³⁰We found that at basketball games testosterone levels did change in fans from before to after the game, especially when fans identified strongly with the players.

The biggest effect we saw of this kind was around the final game of the World Cup soccer tournament in 1994. Brazil and Italy were tied. Two of my students, Candice Lutter and Julie Fielden, went to sports bars in Atlanta where soccer fans gathered. Lutter went to a bar fre-

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quented by Italians and Fielden went to a bar frequented by Brazilians. They recruited twelve Brazilian men and nine Italian men to provide saliva samples before and after the game. Brazil won the game with a penalty kick at the last possible moment. The Brazilian fans were ecstatic, and the newspaper the next day showed pictures of them being arrested for rioting on Peachtree Street, Atlanta's "Main Street." The Italian fans were devastated. One of them had injured his throat cheering, and there was blood in his saliva sample. He said to Lutter, in his Italian accent, "Saliva Girl, it is my heart that is bleeding." Although only men were in the study, there were a few Brazilian women at the Italian bar, and after the game, they were quite rowdy. They found Lutter's group of Italian men and taunted them with insults. When we assayed the samples, we found that eleven of the twelve Brazilian men had increased testosterone levels after the game, and all nine Italian men had decreased levels. These changes are shown in Figure 4.3.

Figure 4.3
Changes in testosterone levels among Brazilian and Italian
fans around the final match of the 1994 World Cup of soccer.
The Brazilian team defeated the Italian team, and within
minutes testosterone levels had increased among Brazilian
fans and decreased among Italian fans.

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The results of the study did not surprise our son, Alan, at all. Alan's work, which involves calculating the economic benefits of environmental conservation, takes him to South America frequently, and in 1994, he was living in Rio de Janeiro. He got a close-up look at World Cup fever, so much so that on the day Brazil played the United States, he and an American friend left their neighborhood and watched the game in a bar where nobody knew them. When another customer asked where they were from, they said, "Canada." Despite the dangerous edge of the high emotions surrounding the games, Alan was optimistic about the effect that winning would have on Brazil's economy.

At the time of the World Cup, Brazil was in the midst of currency reform. Inflation was so bad that people spent their money on payday, because just a few days later it would buy only half as much. The buzz around Rio was that if Brazil won the World Cup, the new currency would be successful. Sure enough, Brazil won and the new currency virtually eliminated inflation. Of course, the World Cup victory alone did not cure Brazil's economic woes, but it did spark a nationwide can-do spirit. Good political and economic leadership worked together with postWorld Cup optimism to turn the economy around.

Testosterone changes may have other effects on fans. Wife abuse has been reported to increase in the Washington, D.C., area after the Red-skins win their football games.
³¹If testosterone increases in the male fans, and they have arguments with their mates, the increased testosterone could lead to increased violence. While we would expect fans of a winning team to be in good spirits and be easy to get along with, that isn't always the case. Good spirits plus testosterone can equal rambunctiousness and sometimes violence.

Winning and losing in small ways is a part of everyday life. In writing this book, I had spent about a month working on one of the chapters. I thought it was pretty good, and I asked Mary for her opinion. She read the chapter carefully, fidgeted a bit, and said it needed more work. She was polite about it, but I could tell she thought I should wad the chapter up and make it into a ball for our dog, Bogart. Mary had been right in her judgment before, so I could not just dismiss what she said. She made her comments in the evening, and by the next morning I still had not quite recovered. I was depressed. I went to work and collected a saliva sample from myself. By the second day things looked better. I was more opti-

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mistic, and I felt I might succeed after all. I went to work and collected another saliva sample. We assayed the two samples and found my testosterone level to be about 30 percent higher on the second day than on the first. My testosterone was lower when I was depressed and higher when I was optimistic.

Sometimes we lose in big ways, defeated not in a game but in real life. People can be kidnapped, drafted into military service, thrown into jail, or captured by a foreign power. Disaster is not always so dramatic. It can strike at home or at work. A physician acquaintance told me that when large numbers of men lost their jobs in the Northwest during aircraft industry layoffs, there were widespread reports of increased cases of impotence. This was likely related to lowered testosterone levels. It would be interesting to know if the reverse was true when the Saturn automotive plant opened in Spring Hill, Tennessee, making many new jobs available. It is possible that major events, like the German invasion of France at the beginning of World War II or the Allied liberation at the end of the war, might affect the testosterone levels of whole nations.

Suicide is the ultimate defeat. People committing suicide may be trying to take charge of their lives, seizing control of their fate and ending an unhappy state, but they have also failed at finding a satisfactory way to live. Would their testosterone increase because they have finally taken charge, or would it decrease because they have failed at living? We measured testosterone in a small sample of patients hospitalized after having made suicide attempts, and we compared them with patients admitted for other reasons. We found that those who had attempted suicide were low in testosterone. We do not know whether the suicide attempters had been low in testosterone for a long time, or how they might be different from people who were successful in committing suicide. These findings suggest, however, that suicide is in some way related to testosterone, and thus presumably to dominance, success, and failure.

Hyena Values and Human Values

We began this chapter with hyenas. Hyenas are not civilized. They have simple values, closely tied to life, survival, and hormones. Their values of the day are what their hormones "want." Human values are different.

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Human values are guided by human history and experience. They come from our parents, friends, schools, clubs, and religious organizations, and experiences of everyday life. They develop and change from generation to generation. Testosterone is well suited to helping one person become dominant over others, using fighting and violence when necessary. But because of other values, the violence that testosterone would produce in a hyena or other animal is restrained in a person. Human values exist separately from hormones, and they temper the effects of hormones. With good manners and nonviolent moral values, people can control testosterone, though testosterone is always there to be reckoned with.

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5
Love and Sex

Love, Magic, and Molecules

After reading about violence in Chapter 4, it may be hard to believe that testosterone has anything to do with love, but it does. This chapter is about testosterone and other molecular conjurers that dally with the magic of love and sex.

Cindy
^*understands the molecules and appreciates the magic. She is a lover, and although she has recently settled down to a monogamous relationship, she is what my mother-in-law would have called "a man's woman." That means that Cindy is comfortable with men and enjoys their company, and they enjoy hers.

Cindy was a student at Georgia State University several years ago and was involved in some of the research reported in this book. Like most of the students who work in our lab, she had a sample of her own saliva assayed. Her testosterone turned out to be so high that I asked her to provide saliva we could use as our high female control, which we include in all assays. Cindy is no longer at GSU, but her saliva is.

Cindy came from a rambunctious family. Her mother's father was a Los Angeles policeman, and her father's mother was an armed robber who wore boots and a cowboy hat, drove a hot pink Chevy truck, and served three sentences in Texas prisons. With cops and robbers in her family tree, it is not surprising that Cindy is a high-testosterone woman. What might surprise a lot of people is that she is attractive in a feminine way.