Men: Time to Make Peace With Your Inner Testosterone
In a research study led by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues at U. of Cambridge, researchers discovered one important way in which the brains of infant boys are influenced by their exposure to different levels of testosterone in the womb.
In this study, they tested a unique cohort of boys, 8 years of age, whose fetal testosterone had been previously measured from amniotic fluid at 13 weeks gestation. The boys were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to assess changes in brain activity while viewing pictures of negative (fear), positive (happy), neutral, or scrambled faces.
They found that increased fetal testosterone predicted more sensitivity in the brain's reward system to positively, compared to negatively, valenced facial cues. This means that reward-related brain regions of boys with higher fetal testosterone levels respond more to positive facial emotion compared to negative facial emotion than boys who with smaller levels of fetal testosterone.
In addition, increased fetal testosterone levels predicted increased behavioural approach tendencies later in life via its influence on the brain's reward system...
Although present at low levels in females, testosterone is one of the primary sex hormones that exerts substantial influence over the emergence of differences between males and females.
...In adults and adolescents, heightened testosterone has been shown to reduce fear, lower sensitivity to punishment, increase risk-tasking, and enhance attention to threat. These effects interact substantially with context to affect social behaviour. This knowledge about the effects of testosterone in adolescence and adulthood suggests that it is related to influencing the balance between approach and avoidance behaviour. These same behaviours are heightened in the teenage years... _MedIndia
"We have discovered that in young boys, in parallel to what happens in adult men, exposure to prenatal testosterone predicts shape variation in their faces," said Katrin Schaefer, professor of anthropology at the University of Vienna in Austria and lead author of the study. "We now know that the prenatal environment influences the shape of the face in male children as well as adult men, so the association is present before puberty." _CosmosPrenatal testosterone levels can also influence later language development in infancy and early childhood.
Testosterone has a powerful influence on brain and body development from the prenatal period, and throughout childhood and adolescence into adulthood. One of the primary reasons why men are being so thoroughly supplanted on college campuses by women, is the refusal of educational systems from K12 and beyond to acknowledge the differences in the ways that boys learn -- largely as a result of different hormonal effects in the brains of men vs women.
Modern educational systems are now being run largely by women for the benefit of women -- at the expense of men. This approach has been good for particular political and economic factions, but it has not been good for US society as a whole, and is not sustainable in the long run.
The sooner that men make peace with their inner testosterone, the better a society they can help to create for both men and women.
It is unlikely that women will ever make peace with men's inner testosterone, but as long as most men do so, most women should be able to accomodate themselves.