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A Side Effect of Testosterone Poisoning

Posted by kdawson on from the go-ahead-and-get-mad dept.

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."

5 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. More science fraud. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:More science fraud. by dbIII · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It seems that, at present, with the social breakdown happening in the United States, almost all science reporting contains some dishonesty.

      It's the Lysenkoism you get when you get anti-intellectuals in powerful positions in increasing numbers. This produces garbage in defence like MIT material scientists talking about bulletproof superhero costumes to get a grant when they know that some thickness is needed to absorb energy but the comics will be believed before they are. Another example is the creation debate coming up again - it's really about the anti-intellectuals challenging anyone with a half decent education and using the argument they are most comfortable with even though it is irrelevant - Mendel was actually a very pious monk so the religeon angle is just an excuse to pretend they know more.

  2. Seriously flawed methodology. by AJWM · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Obligatory jokes aside, the experimental methodology was borked.

    Participants then worked on a "learning task" in which one complex sequence of keypresses was followed by an angry face on the screen, another sequence was followed by a neutral face, and a third sequence was followed by no face.

    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.)

    Participants who were high in testosterone relative to other members of their sex learned the sequence that was followed by an emotional face better than the other sequences, while participants low in testosterone did not show this learning advantage for sequences that were reinforced by an emotional face.
    [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
  3. Re:Ron Paul and the Republican Debate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Not really by stephanruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.