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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."
...you stupid fucking cocksuckers!
Trolls have no balls!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
So that's why Gates keeps Balmer around?
It seems to explain anonymous cowards too.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
}:(
There is your reward. Are you happy now?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Sly Stallone was caught recently in Sydney Airport importing (heh heh... drug smugglers smuggle, but Celebrities "import") quantities of Testosterone and Human Growth Hormone. Maybe Sly is updating his image for the YouTube generation. He wants to not only be a big troll, but a big scary troll too:
y -for-illegal-hormones/2007/05/15/1178995115011.htm ll -apology/2007/05/15/1178995136992.html
"I want... what they want... what those trolls. They just want to be heard. {grabs mike} Bill Gates, I'm comin' to get you!" (Whacks Steve Balmer with chair and dives out the window with DRM lawyers in pursui
Sly sad it was prescribed by his doctors for a "mystery medical ailment". No, seriously.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/stallone-sorr
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/stallones-ful
Don't panic, Rambolovers and Rockettes. Being a 51st State of America, Australia extends immunity to Hollywood Celebrities too. Sly will gush about he loves Australia and walk free. Just as well. Here's to Rambo IV, where he goes back and kicks the ass of the Tabliban guys he freed in III.
I have worked my way up from grunt work to foreman/supervisor; this line of work takes some words to get your ass moving and you haven't got time to be sitting around day dreaming.
Construction is a stressful business majority of the time and a lot of people have no idea what it is like to have an inspector that cost $300/hr to just sit around because your crew couldn't get everything cleaned up. So you raise your voice and the next time they know to pick up the pace to get the project completed.
Where did it say anything about building contractors and trolls in that article anyways.
I find my job very enjoying knowing that I usually can complete a several million dollar project in a week and get enjoyment at looking at a finished project. There are a lot of hot heads in all types of business it is just that when you work construction you usually have to raise your voice over all the other stuff going on and seem to express yourself more because it is a very busy environment with million dollar projects weekly that will fuck up your whole bidding schedule for other projects.
Now how a internet troll and a building contractor are comparable I have no fucking clue but the article described something completely different on people being teasers get enjoyment out of it and I usually don't tease my crew besides rolling up with a 24 pack in the back of my truck for them when they finish the days work.
Why would it explain Internet trolls if you can't fucking see their faces? Idiots. I hope you all die in a fire. I'm off to lift weights while my wife cooks in the kitchen.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Lots of estrogen leads to bigger breasts, which may lead one to see many happier faces.
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.
As a troll, I find that smiley face annoying >:(
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.
I wonder what that means about my demeanor...
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Of course, with chimps it's actually the ones that stay on the fringes and avoid the Alpha (we'll call them Chimp Geeks) that have the most sex with the females, as the Alpha & underlings are too busy and stressed about staying on the top o' the heap...
Building sites and the industry as a whole is very competitive, very aggressive and quite physically confrontational, as a designer/estimator/contract administrator, it is quite a challenge to enforce your presence and control on the contractors, and ensure that project goals are met (good training for being an aggresive, proactive customer, you buy product, you don't get sold product).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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
What I find amazing about such so-called scientific reports is that they often seem to be based on a conclusion in search of a hypothesis. So, people responded most strongly to an angry face vs. a neutral face or the absence of any face (duh on the last one.) Talk about skewed! What, no happy face? What if people had reacted more strongly to that? That would have upset the conclusion just a bit.
I think the best conclusion you can draw from this is that people respond to the stimulus of an angry face vs. a neutral one because it is in an animal's nature to avoid things that might hurt them. I would sooner respond to a rock thrown at me than one just sitting on the ground, too. That doesn't necessarily mean I seek to have rocks thrown at me, does it? It's a little something called a survival instinct. Sure, there are people who are just a little bit perverse and enjoy the adrenaline rush of somebody being angry at them, but I think bringing that into the article smacks of an author who either only poorly understands their subject, or is trying too hard to make it digestable for the average person.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
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.
I can think of another theory which would fit the results...
How about people who have higher testosterone levels get bigger (or quicker) *adrenal responses*? Did these scientists check any other hormone levels? Did they have subjects hooked up to a pulse/ox monitor? Did they check adrenal response, and/or other fight-or-flight factors, when they administered their test?
I have worked in a University psych department, and though it is not mentioned in the article, I doubt they had these subjects hooked up to so much as a *pulse/ox*. Most psychologists tend to divorce the brain from the body. It is foolish. The brain is just another organ, and we need to stop treating it like it is somehow mystically separate from the body. Especially scientists, who should be ashamed of themselves for doing so.
News flash: Your brain is hooked up to your cardiovascular system, and if that gets goosed, your brain, if it can stand the strain, is going to be more efficient.
I want to know what the subjects' heart rates were when they saw that angry face.
But rather than investigating the obvious suggestion of a physical response to negative stimulus, these dopes claim that such men ENJOY seeing an angry face instead? Malarkey. I doubt *any* subject would agree with the sentence: "I like angry faces."
I think the only goal of this study was to put down men, and how perverse we apparently are. These are politicians, not scientists, and when they collect data that may indicate that testosterone can confer limited advantage in crisis, they perversely claim that men *relish* anger, because no matter what data came back, that's what they've set out to "prove."
Of course, there is the ugly fact that MY explanation might have us reviewing the concept of female combat brigades again, and that is politically unacceptable to these "scientists."
"Guess What? Men _Are_ More Naturally Able When Confronting Hostility" (Can you imagine that headline?)
But honestly, we can give female soldiers shots of testosterone to improve their combat readiness if my theory is correct. What can we do when we draw the *wrong* conclusion: that men "enjoy" anger? Ban men? Didn't Maureen Dowd write a book about that?
God save us from politicians, and their damned lies, statistics, and correlative studies.
--
Toro
Next study, "high testosterone" males more likely to shoot off angry emails without thinking!
Another horrible side effect is winning the Tour de France.
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.
I'm tired of the way men are portrayed in TV and movies now. Virtually every family sitcom has the father as a bumbling idiot and the woman is always the level headed take charge person. Ads on TV frequently do this too with the guy needing to be set straight by the smarter, more mature woman. In movies it is pretty common to see the guy as unable to make a decision and the woman is the hero. You even see it in kid's cartoons now. I wonder if the writers do this to appeal to woman in the audience and men just passively accept it. It is a little jab but after seeing this image countless times I'm sure it has some affect on people's perceptions.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Well, I did sumbmit it as funny. I didn't use the word poisoning in my original sumbission. The subject was originally "Yes I am trying to piss you off."
I'm just cranky because I just got done spending a couple of years of my life with major contractors who made every single job difficult. These particular guys are an assholes, and I'm sorry to say, that seems to be the rule. I also understand that in that environment, it definitely helps to be pushy and confrontational, and I was trying to be funny.
What do they have in common with internet trolls? They both seem to enjoy pissing other people off for no good reason. If I have to explain it it isn't funny. Probably not funny in the first place.
I'm used to blowing off comments about my profession (geek/sysadm/IT) and didn't think contractors would be so thin skinned.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
You coined the term now we want to now what's your agenda? I still believe
you are from one of these colleges that work hard to feminize whatever male
concept they can so why not start with the male sexual hormone and call that
a poison.
I suppose you can get away with it on campus where lumping the words poison
and testosterone together and maybe adding a little global warming or rainforst
defoliation gets the student population all riled up. Out here in the real world
however you are not dealing with a predictable crowd of insecure youngsters
eager to please and blend. I have enough cohones (full of the hormone I assure
you) to deal with you and if that upsets you then yes... in accordance with the
theory above... I enjoy your upset.
Btw... if you're at a college and in trouble for laughing at the wrong moment
(like when someone starts to talk about testosterone poisoning) go to
http://www.thefire.org/ Foundation for Individual's Rights in Education