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A Side Effect of Testosterone Poisoning
obtuse writes "With a finding that may explain Internet trolls — or at least building contractors — U. of Michigan researchers have discovered that individuals with high levels of testosterone find an angry face rewarding. In their experiments, this was true even if the angry image was perceived subliminally so that the subjects didn't register it consciously."
In addition to trolls and building contractors, it can also explain certain managers, certain HR people, the jerk on the freeway...
The list goes on and on
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
It seems to explain anonymous cowards too.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
Hey we extend immunity to Russel Crowe, he just has to pay a small fee to beat hotel workers about the head with a phone.
Why the hell do people post "mod parent blah blah blah" just GTFO if you have nothing to say
ewh, sorry. was just following the whole troll aspect of this thread. please dont GTFO on account of an anonymous coward.
dont guess I'm a vary good troll.
I don't see the comic connection either. You shouldn't take it too seriously though, because while they may have found some correlation between testosterone, subliminal angry faces, and learning responses, they certainly haven't found a link.
Might as well say you have found a link between shopping for shoes, wearing high heals, and getting pregnant. A correlation is certainly there, but linking them together in the 1-2-3 cause & effect way is a mistaken assumption.
Yeah, I'm sure that's a real common problem here on /.
Next.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
It seems that, at present, with the social breakdown happening in the United States, almost all science reporting contains some dishonesty.
The U.S. is the developed country in which women have the most disfunctional relationships with men. So reporting the story about testosterone as "testosterone poisoning" is a way to get attention. Lesbians, for example, like to use the phrase "testosterone poisoning" about men as a way of convincing women who have relationships with men to have sex with another woman.
In reality, angry people have high testosterone, whether they are men or women. The bodies of both men and women produce testosterone.
If you have observed how hostile women are in the U.S. toward men, I suggest you try visiting Brazil. Women in Brazil are certainly not perfect, and they are sexist, also. However, women in Brazil are, in general, far more confident of themselves, far happier, and far more creative and functional in their relationships with men than women in the United States.
Anyone wondering whether I am in a position to know about Brazilian women can reflect on the fact that I am posting this comment from Brazil. (São Paulo state)
The social breakdown in the U.S. is so advanced that often even men are hostile toward men.
Note the face alternatives: angry, neutral, or none at all. No happy faces, puzzled faces, or any face showing any emotion other than anger. Most people -- testosterone or not -- prefer some kind of facial expression to a totally neutral one. (It indicates some recognition of their presence.) [s/angry/emotional/ from the original]
That's all this experiment shows. Which probably really just means that high-testosterone folks learn this particular kind of task faster. Testosterone is known to have an effect on brain development, so it may just be that high-T levels are just an indicator for people whose brains are already geared to learning this kind of task faster.
Sheesh.
(Doesn't surprise me though. It's been my experience -- and I worked for several years at a university doing, among other things, statistics support for grad students and profs in the social sciences -- that psychologists tend not to be very good at experiment design. Maybe not enough testosterone
-- Alastair
I don't see anything wrong with taking enjoyment pissing other people off.
I think it's unfair to demand people to share your own personal biases and tastes.
you people are bigots and deserve all the beatings that you get!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So maybe high-testosterone people are more sensible not to angry faces, but to emotional faces in general.
Or as I pointed out in another post, maybe it means that high-testosterone people learn this kind of task faster. We already know that testosterone has an influence on early brain development.
Yeah, flawed methodology.
-- Alastair
Why the fuck do you even need to be in a party? Is there some reason you can't evaluate each candidate and vote for the best one in each case regardless of party? Its the party system that responsible for some of the most boneheaded moves by our Congress, look the congressional voting record for the last 30+ years -- the majority of congress always votes along party lines. They vote what's good for their party not good for the country. This is so common that it is big news whenever there are "cross over" votes. It's such a pathetic state of affairs.
1) What's with the "poisoning"? There is no speak of poisoning of testosterone, merely people with "low" vs. "high".
Being a man is a disease. That's the implied message I hear these days. Perhaps you're thinking I'm slightly exaggerating, or that I'm just trolling, but just take a look at this article for instance. The principal author of this research found that men with higher levels of testosterones learn better when faced with angry faces. So the conclusion/title of her study, and the corresponding headline on slashdot should have been: "Construction Workers Learn Better when Faced with Stress" or "Construction Workers Not as Dumb as Previously Thought" -- it shouldn't have been "High-testosterone people reinforced by others' anger".
But instead, the story gets completely reframed, and the researcher herself makes the huge leap of logic that since "Better learning of a task associated with anger faces [it] indicates that the anger faces were rewarding"
What!?! What the F____?? How did she reach that conclusion? And yes, I did understand the thing about the rat learning better when it gets rewarded. The missing part of her remarks however is that there are plenty of other ways we can enhance our memory. For instance, the rat and the human being also learn a lot better when they're about to get killed. And whether it's fear, sorrow, happiness, or simply ecstasy, all those emotional states have been found to enhance our memory, and extend our senses, when compared to our more neutral emotional states. So this doesn't surprise me in the least, that she and her TA, found what they found. So it's not the findings themselves, that trouble me, it's the conclusions they draw from those findings that worry me.
So, why don't you all get together, in some remote location, and make each other miserable. That way you'll all be happy!
And the rest of the world will be a happier, and possibly safer, place without any griefers around.
Alternatively if you prefer you could hang around enjoying making trouble for everyone else, but then it's only fair that everyone else gets the opportunity to enjoy themselves by locking you up in an institution somewhere for the troublesome insane.
Or maybe, and this is a really wild idea here, maybe each of us could try to exprience our own pleasure in a way that doesn't reduce the pleasure of others.
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics