Cognition is not modified by large but temporary changes in sex hormones in men.

Context: Little is known about the role of testosterone and estradiol on cognition in healthy older men.

Objective: The cognitive effects of increasing or lowering testosterone or estradiol were examined.

Design: Cognition was assessed before and after 6 wk of double-blind placebo-controlled hormone modification.

Association between sex steroids and cognition in elderly men.

Objective: To examine the association of cognitive function with sex steroid and sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) levels among elderly men.

Design: Prospective cohort study, The Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), consisting of 5995 US community dwelling men of 65 years or older.

Patients: One thousand six hundred and two men were chosen randomly from MrOS cohort for sex steroid level measurements by Mass Spectrometry (MS) at baseline.

Self-esteem, negative emotionality, and depression as a common temperamental core: a study of mid-adolescent twin girls.

We tested the structure and magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on the overlap among self-esteem, negative emotionality, and major depression symptoms in adolescent girls (N=706) from the Minnesota Twin Family Study. Genetic and environmental influences on all three operated via a general, heritable factor. Genetic influences explained the majority of overlap among the three constructs, as well as most of the variance in self-esteem and negative emotionality.

Estrogen, testosterone, and sequential movement in men.

Behavioral and physiological data suggest that the striatal dopaminergic system is important in the production and execution of sequential movements. Striatal function is also modulated by sex hormones, and previous studies show that estradiol is related to sequential movement in women. The authors examined whether sex hormones are involved in the production of sequential movement in healthy older and younger men.

Age differences in perception and awareness of emotion.

We investigated the effects of age and gender on emotional perception and physiology using electrodermal skin conductance response (SCR) and examined whether SCR is related to subjective perceptions of emotional pictures. Older adults found pictures to be more positive and arousing than younger participants. Older women rated pictures more extremely at both ends of the valence continuum: they rated positive pictures more positively and negative pictures more negatively.

Hot flashes and estrogen therapy do not influence cognition in early menopausal women.

Objective: To examine how menopausal symptoms and estrogen therapy (ET)-induced symptom relief affect cognition in early menopause.

Design: There were two components. Part 1 was a cross-sectional study of 37 healthy, recently postmenopausal women with diverse menopausal symptoms.

Self-evaluation in a naturalistic context: the case of juvenile offenders.

The authors investigated how self-evaluation motives (self-enhancement, self-assessment, self-verification, self-improvement - and also self-diminishment and no information) shape self-knowledge preferences in male incarcerated juvenile offenders (IJOs). IJOs responded to questions on how much they would like to receive and actually received each of six types of feedback (positive, truthful, improving, consistent, negative and no feedback) from each of six sources (teachers, parents, siblings, best friend, girlfriend and behavioural specialists or psychologists). IJOs disliked negative feedback and the lack of feedback.

Androgen deprivation impairs memory in older men.

Androgen deprivation leads to a profound loss of synaptic density in the hippocampus and changes in learning and memory in animal models. The authors examined group differences in verbal memory between men on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), a commonly used treatment for prostate cancer, and healthy men. The authors found that men on ADT have a specific impairment of retention but normal encoding and retrieval processes on a word list-learning task.

Testosterone loss and estradiol administration modify memory in men.

Purpose: Little is known about the effect of androgen deprivation therapy on the brain despite the fact that sex steroid receptors are abundant in cortical brain regions that mediate memory and other cognitive functions. We characterized the impact of androgen deprivation and of subsequent estradiol therapy on the long-term and working memory of patients with prostate cancer.

Materials And Methods: Long-term memory (immediate and delayed paragraph recall tests), working memory (SOP and Trails tests) and Profile of Mood States were assessed at baseline and 4 weeks later in 18 patients with androgen independent prostate cancer beginning second line hormonal therapy with transdermal estradiol 0.

Executive self, self-esteem, and negative affectivity: relations at the phenotypic and genotypic level.

Complementary approaches examined the relations among executive self, self-esteem, and negative affectivity. A cross-sectional (N = 4,242) and a longitudinal (N = 158) study established that self-esteem mediated the relation between executive self and negative affectivity. A 3rd study (N = 878 twin pairs) replicated this pattern and examined genetic and environmental influences underlying all 3 phenotypes.