Slashdot Mirror
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."
>:(
I suppose I am giving this troll what they really subliminally want.
So that's why Gates keeps Balmer around?
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.
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 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.