Under the influence: exogenous testosterone influences men's cross-sex perceptions of sexual interest.

The sexual misperception bias is a cognitive bias in which men tend to overestimate sexual interest from women, potentially shaped by evolutionary mating strategies. Testosterone, often linked to mating behaviors, might play a role in sustaining sexual overperceptions. To explore this possibility, we conducted a placebo-controlled study with 190 heterosexual men, administering either 11 mg of testosterone or a placebo.

Salivary uric acid dynamics are associated with stress response hormones among African Americans in an urban sample.

Acute physiological responses to psychosocial stressors are a potential pathway underlying racial disparities in stress-related illnesses. Uric acid (UA) is a potent antioxidant that has been linked to disparities in stress-related illnesses, and recent research has shown that UA is responsive to acute social stress. However, an examination of the relationships between the purinergic system and other commonly measured stress systems is lacking.

The Road Not Taken: What Developmental Psychology Might Learn From Darwin's Insights Concerning Sexual Selection.

Developmental Psychology is the branch of psychology that studies, not only human behavior, but how and why human behavior changes over time. This essay seeks to review to what extent Developmental Psychology has failed to perceive human behavior through the lens of evolutionary theory in general, and in particular sexual selection as first described by Darwin and later elaborated on by many, including Robert Trivers and Geoffrey Miller; the essay asserts that this failure has resulted in many wrong turns and missed opportunities. In some cases, major developmental theorists (e.

Writing about justice and injustice: Complex effects on affect, performance, threat, and biological responses to acute social stress among african American women and men.

Objective: Brief, culturally-tailored, and scalable stress coping interventions are needed to address a broad range of stress-related health disparities, including among African Americans. In this study, we develop two brief justice writing interventions and demonstrate a methodological approach for evaluating how prompting African Americans to think about justice and injustice can alter responses to acute social stress.

Methods: African American women and men were randomized to a neutral writing condition or one of two justice-based writing interventions, which prompted them to recall past experiences of personal justice - with (adjunctive injustice) or without (personal justice-only) recalling and writing about injustice.

Testosterone rapidly increases neural reactivity to threat in healthy men: a novel two-step pharmacological challenge paradigm.

Background: Previous research suggests that testosterone (T) plays a key role in shaping competitive and aggressive behavior in humans, possibly by modulating threat-related neural circuitry. However, this research has been limited by the use of T augmentation that fails to account for baseline differences and has been conducted exclusively in women. Thus, the extent to which normal physiologic concentrations of T affect threat-related brain function in men remains unknown.

Social status moderates the relationship between facial structure and aggression.

A growing body of evidence has linked individual differences in facial structure-in particular, the facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR)-to social behaviors, including aggression, cheating, and nonreciprocation of trust. In the research reported here, we extended this work by demonstrating that the association between FWHR and aggression is moderated by subjective and objective measures of social status. In Study 1 (N = 237 college students), FWHR was positively correlated with aggressive behavior, but only among men reporting relatively low social status.

Applying evolutionary thinking to the study of emotion.

This paper argues for invoking evolutionary, functional thinking in analyzing emotions. It suggests that the fitness needs of normal individuals be kept in mind when trying to understand emotional behavior. This point of view is elaborated in sections addressing these topics: defining emotion; applying comparative analysis to the study of emotions; focusing on the elicitors and resulting motivated behaviors mediated by the various affects; recognizing that not all emotions have prominent, distinct facial expressions; acknowledging all of the basic emotions and not just some exemplars; crediting the more sensible Cannon-Bard theory over James-Lange; recognizing the more ancient, fundamental role of the limbic system in emotion compared with that of the neocortex; and analyzing socio-emotional interactions as they occur naturally, not just individual emotional behavior studied under artificial conditions.

Changes in testosterone mediate the effect of winning on subsequent aggressive behaviour.

Testosterone concentrations rise rapidly in the context of competitive interactions and remain elevated in winners relative to losers. Theoretical models suggest that this divergent neuroendocrine response serves to mediate future dominance behaviours. Although research in animal models provides compelling support for this model, evidence for its applicability to human social behaviour is limited.