Read Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior Online

Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

Tags: #test

Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (39 page)

 
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remains to be seen whether this is part of a trend and whether it has anything to do with improved status for women.
Two Kinds of People, Two Ways to Live
Frank Sinatra sang, "I did it my way," and the Beatles sang, "I get by with a little help from my friends."
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These are the ways in which high- and low-testosterone people approach the world. Sinatra's song is the self-congratulatory, high-testosterone way, while the Beatles' song is the congenial, low-testosterone way. They are opposing strategies, one based on dominance and the other on cooperation. The tough, high-testosterone person looks out for himself and competes for personal advantage, while the sociable, low-testosterone person avoids struggles for dominance and works with his associates for their mutual advantage.
While it is common to think of high-testosterone people as being simply independent, a study I did with my students indicates that this is not entirely true. We asked high- and low-testosterone men and women to carry beepers and diaries, and we beeped them at random intervals several times a day for four days.
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We asked them to write down what they were doing and thinking each time they heard the beep. Examination of the diaries indicated that high-testosterone people, both men and women, depended on the company of others to make them happy. High-testosterone people seem to be unhappy when they are alone and happy when they are with people. They appear to need many friends and to spend a lot of time with them. Perhaps Animal and all his girlfriends, mentioned in Chapter 1, are examples of high-testosterone sociability. Low-testosterone people, on the other hand, seem to be less compulsively social. They like to spend more time alone or with intimate friends. Perhaps the relative solitude of farming is one thing that makes farming attractive to low-testosterone people.
Even though high-testosterone people seek companionship, they are more direct and confrontational in social situations. People with lower testosterone like to get along with others, and they are more pleasant, more polite, and more considerate. On the average, high-testosterone individuals are tougher, and low-testosterone individuals are friendlier. In real life there are many exceptions, of course, and on occasion anyone can be tough or friendly.
 
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Nevertheless, most people lean more toward one strategy or the other. Low-testosterone people tend to prefer the kinder, gentler approach, and, except for unusual situations, they rely on it. Sticking with one strategy is simple and does not clutter the mind with too many possibilities. Some creatures are biologically programmed to prefer a particular strategy. The two types of males among the desert tree lizards described in Chapter 6 either competed to control territory or avoided competition and sought out uncontested territory. Both strategies allowed the males to survive, find mates, and reproduce. People tend toward one strategy over the other, but they are not as rigidly fixed as the lizards are.
Many people, including trial lawyers like Bruce Harvey who can be pleasant with jurors and tough with prosecutors, need to be flexible. With practice, they can learn to use both strategies with equal effect, but not necessarily with equal comfort. I have a woman friend who is a political activist. Her testosterone level is above the female average, but she prefers to be pleasant. She was brought up "to behave like a lady," and most of the time her upbringing influences her behavior more than her testosterone. Nevertheless, she can be tough, especially when "some officious jerk" tries to bully her. For a few seconds after she decides to get tough, she has stress symptoms: her throat tightens and blood rushes to her head. While the symptoms last, her activist friends say she has a wild look that scares people. She finds the symptoms unpleasant, but she thinks they work to her advantage.
Some people, like President Bush, are skilled enough to move back and forth between the two strategies with no apparent strain. In his political speeches, Bush called for a "kinder and gentler nation." Then he added a challenge"Read my lips . . . No new taxes!"imitating the actor Clint Eastwood's challenge, "Go ahead. Make my day." The comedian Rich Little said he impersonated President Bush by pretending to be Mr. Rogers imitating John Wayne. High-testosterone people have something in common with actors, as noted earlier, and they may find it easy to move back and forth between smiles and toughness. The high-testosterone individual can be friendly and pleasant when the occasion calls for it, but the low-testosterone individual finds it difficult, though not necessarily impossible, to be overtly aggressive. Assertiveness training classes are popular among people who don't want to be bulldozed by aggressive people. Assertiveness, like charm, can be learned.
 
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Sometimes a change in strategy accompanies a change in testosterone. As we've discussed, polygamous male birds are high in testosterone throughout the breeding season, presumably because they compete continuously with other males over females. Monogamous male birds are high in testosterone only at the beginning of the breeding season, and then, as soon as they find mates, their testosterone levels drop. Males need a lot of testosterone to get a mate, but they need less to be good parents and caregivers.
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The study of veterans mentioned in Chapter 5 showed that married men are lower in testosterone than single men, and a study of Air Force officers found that testosterone levels decreased when they married and increased when they divorced.
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Men have also been found to have higher levels of prolactin and lower levels of testosterone immediately after they become fathers, as have the males in some species of small mammals, including gerbils and mice.
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Perhaps these hormonal changes set them up for the gentler activities of parenthood.
All these findings come from studies of males. We don't know whether testosterone also drops in females when they become mothers. One of the oddest changes associated with testosterone is a sex-role reversal in the spotted sandpiper. Female sandpipers increase in testosterone sevenfold in the breeding season, while males decrease twenty-five-fold. After this change occurs, the males sit peaceably on the eggs in the nest, while the females wander off to their own affairs.
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When Your Level Is Too Low
Most of the studies of violence, divorce, and misbehavior indicate desirable effects of low-testosterone levels. In comparison with others, men in the bottom 10 percent of the testosterone distribution are about half as likely to have trouble with the police, use hard drugs, be divorced, or hit their mates.
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Low testosterone does not make a person weak or cowardly, but it does takes away the combative "chip on the shoulder" that sometimes goes with very high testosterone. Men and women in the low-normal range of testosterone tend to be friendly and accommodating, but that tendency may not hold when testosterone is extremely low.
There is a floor, a minimum level of testosterone, below which
 
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problems begin to occur. Endocrinologists find that low testosterone has its greatest effect in lowering energy and reducing sexual activity. People with levels below the normal range are sometimes so deficient in energy that it is difficult for them to smile and be sociable or to otherwise show interest in people. Very low levels of testosterone may be related to clinical depression,
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although most studies have not found this to be true.
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Although it contributes to fatigue and reduced libido, a testosterone deficiency does not usually seem to make people particularly sad. Overall, the findings about negative effects of low testosterone are not clear.
Most people who are very low in testosterone appear normal. Prostate cancer patients whose testosterone levels are being lowered as part of their treatment appear good humored. I heard about a man who volunteered to be in a testosterone experiment. He agreed to have his testosterone temporarily reduced to almost zero, and he seemed not to mind when he lost his sex drive. He knew, of course, that the effect was temporary. Someone who lost his libido without knowing if or when he would get it back might feel quite differently.
Extremely low levels of testosterone affect women just as they affect men. Women have less testosterone than men, and their levels fall even lower after menopause, when the ovaries stop producing estrogen and testosterone. For quite a while, gynecologists have been prescribing estrogen to relieve menopausal symptoms, but recently they have begun to treat patients who do not respond well enough to estrogen alone with additional small doses of testosterone. Women who take both estrogen and testosterone report an increase in energy, strength, sexual interest, and general positive outlook. I know a woman who took only estrogen following surgical menopause, an operation in which her ovaries were removed. She said that after two years she had lost so much strength in her grip that she could barely hold a vacuum cleaner to do housework. Adding testosterone to her estrogen treatment corrected her problem.
Related Hormones
This chapter is about kind and gentle behavior that goes with low levels of testosterone, but testosterone does not act alone. It interacts or coex-
 
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ists with other hormones and neurotransmitters, including cortisol, serotonin, and prolactin, which decrease testosterone and/or moderate its effects.
Cortisol, whether naturally produced or injected, is one of the hormones that lower testosterone in men.
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Cortisol is part of the body's fight-or-flight response; it releases stored energy and helps us deal with emergencies, both those we run from and those we face head-on. Cortisol is normally associated with stressful situations, but in some individuals it is chronically high and chronically stressful. Low-testosterone men who are high in cortisol are not inclined to be aggressive or confrontational, but they are not as friendly and cheerful as other low-testosterone men. The stress associated with elevated levels of cortisol tends to make them anxious.
The effect of cortisol on testosterone is different in women than in men, probably because the adrenal cortex, which produces cortisol, also produces testosterone. In women, testosterone from the adrenals is roughly equal to the testosterone from the ovaries, but in men, testosterone from the adrenals is relatively unimportant compared to the amount that comes from the testes. In women, testosterone appears not to be lowered significantly by increases in cortisol.
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Women may be more likely than men to be high or low in both hormones at the same time.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that affects some of the same aspects of mind and social behavior that testosterone does, but in a way that gives people a more pleasant demeanor. At present, it is not clear whether serotonin produces its effects on personality independently of testosterone, or somehow reduces the effects of testosterone, or does a little of each. Serotonin research, particularly on human subjects, is more expensive and more difficult than testosterone research, because serotonin is assayed from spinal fluid. Spitting is easy, giving blood is more difficult, and donating spinal fluid is beyond what almost anyone will do for science. In 1995, a military study of testosterone and serotonin in prison inmates was put on hold until researchers could find an easier way to collect serotonin samples.
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In the meantime, researchers can make some guesses based on indirect evidence. There are several studies in which fluoxetine, a drug known by its brand name, Prozac, has been administered to laboratory
 
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animals. Fluoxetine, which inhibits serotonin uptake and therefore keeps serotonin levels high, seems to be related to increased levels of prolactin, a hormone that is known to reduce testosterone levels.
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Another study shows that large intravenous doses of the amino acid tryptophan, a precursor of serotonin, will increase prolactin levels.
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These studies suggest to researchers that high serotonin levels may reduce testosterone, at least slightly, by raising prolactin levels.
Anyone with a friend who's been successfully treated with Prozac knows how elevated levels of serotonin affect personality. People who take Prozac are likely to be calmer, more confident, less irritable, more optimistic, less impulsive, and more pleasant to be around than they were before they started taking the drug. In some species of monkeys, alpha males are likely to be high in serotonin. As described in Chapter 5, female vervet monkeys like high-serotonin males and help them gain leadership roles. Such high-serotonin males are dominant, as high-testosterone males are, but they are calmer. Apparently the females appreciate the calmer and less violent leadership style of high-serotonin males. As far as peaceful behavior goes, the worst combination would seem to be low serotonin together with high testosterone. A person with this kind of mix would likely be both impulsive and dominant.
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Sometimes when we examine self-confident, dominant men, expecting them to be high in testosterone, we find they are not. For example, we studied an outdoorsman who lived in Alaska and spent weeks alone in the wilderness. He had a touch of vanity, and he always came back to civilization looking neat, with his beard and mustache in good shape. Suzanne Womack, who was a friend of his, said he had panache and sex appeal, and she thought he would be high in testosterone. We checked him out (after she collected saliva from him on a trip to Alaska) and found that his testosterone level was average. I suspect, but do not know, that his serotonin level was high. He had the kind of calm competence associated with leadership, the kind that makes high-serotonin male vervet monkeys attractive to females.
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Two other people Suzanne checked out from Alaska were mountain climbers, both very high in testosterone. In exploring other characteristics with these men, she asked one to describe how high his sex drive was. He said, "Ballistic!"
We did not assay the mountain climber's other hormone levels, but

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