Testosterone and estrogen impact social evaluations and vicarious emotions: A double-blind placebo-controlled study.

Abstract

The abilities to "read" other peoples' intentions and emotions, and to learn from their experiences, are critical to survival. Previous studies have highlighted the role of sex hormones, notably testosterone and estrogen, in these processes. Yet it is unclear how these hormones affect social cognition and emotion using acute hormonal administration. In the present double-blind placebo-controlled study, we administered an acute exogenous dose of testosterone or estrogen to healthy female and male volunteers, respectively, with the aim of investigating the effects of these steroids on social-cognitive and emotional processes. Following hormonal and placebo treatment, participants made (a) facial dominance judgments, (b) mental state inferences (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test), and (c) learned aversive associations through watching others' emotional responses (observational fear learning [OFL]). Our results showed that testosterone administration to females enhanced ratings of facial dominance but diminished their accuracy in inferring mental states. In men, estrogen administration resulted in an increase in emotional (vicarious) reactivity when watching a distressed other during the OFL task. Taken together, these results suggest that sex hormones affect social-cognitive and emotional functions at several levels, linking our results to neuropsychiatric disorders in which these functions are impaired. (PsycINFO Database Record

Does testosterone impair men’s cognitive empathy? Evidence from two large-scale randomized controlled trials

“…Prenatal T proxies (the 2D:4D, either right-hand, left-hand, or their average) did not correlate with RMET scores in both experiments or moderate the effect of T administration, echoing other recent findings (Bos et al, 2016;Carré et al, 2015;Olsson et al, 2016) (see Supplementary Material Tables S3a-S4b). These results are in line with previous reports showing no correlation between the 2D:4D and RMET scores (Hönekopp, 2012;Masuya et al, 2015;Voracek & Dressler, 2006), and in contrast to the two papers reporting an interaction between 2D:4D and the exogenous T's effect on the RMET (Carré et al, 2015;van Honk et al, 2011).…”

“…A similar experiment with roughly twice the sample size (N=33) found a much smaller 3 effect (P=0.048, one-tailed), and no moderation by 2D:4D (Olsson et al, 2016). A third experiment of 16 females found neither a main effect nor a moderation by 2D:4D (Bos et al, 2016).…”

“…A handful of experiments (see Table 1) attempted to address the above limitation by testing the effects of T administration on cognitive empathy in neurotypical adults, and investigating the dependency of these effects on the 2D:4D biomarker (Bos et al, 2016;Carré et al, 2015;Olsson, Kopsida, Sorjonen, & Savic, 2016;van Honk et al, 2011). This line of research critically relies on an assumption originating in animal research, that in utero androgen exposure moderates the activational effect of T (Zheng & Cohn, 2011).…”

“…Although the RMET is a noisy psychological instrument, 5 and 2D:4D is, at best, a noisy proxy of prenatal T exposure (Berenbaum, Bryk, Nowak, Quigley, & Moffat, 2009), all samples ranged between 16 and 33 participants, which might have been too meager to credibly estimate a true effect size. It is therefore impossible to know whether the inconsistencies in the literature are due to an absence of a true association, or the result of false 3 The primary publication (van Honk et al 2011) had a statistical power of only 0.26 to detect the effect size found in the similar study with twice the sample size (Olsson et al 2016). 4 One experiment (in males) reported a statistically significant moderating effect, but only for the left-hand 2D:4D; the two other experiments reported no moderation of the 2D:4D (Bos et al, 2016).…”

Neural responses in the pain matrix when observing pain of others are unaffected by testosterone administration

“…T also reduces mindreading, the cognitive empathic ability whereby one infers the emotional state of the other from limited information. In women, two studies showed reduced performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test after T (RMET, 9,10), and a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows this effect can depend on reduced neural connectivity of the frontal brain regions with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and premotor regions (11). In men, T has also been shown to reduce RMET performance, although with the effect being dependent on a marker for fetal T exposure (the 2D:4D ratio) and psychopathic traits (12).…”