Abstract
Dominance contests are recurrent and widespread causes of stress among mammals. Studies of activation of the stress axis in social defeat – as reflected in levels of adrenal glucocorticoid, cortisol – have generated scattered and sometimes contradictory results, suggesting that biopsychological individual differences might play an important mediating role, at least in humans. In the context of a larger study of the regulation of endocrine responses to competition, we evaluated the notion that mood states, such as self-assurance and hostility, may influence cortisol reactivity to dominance cues via an interplay with baseline testosterone, considered as a potential marker of individual differences in dominance. Seventy healthy male university students (mean age 20.02, range 18–26) provided saliva samples before and after competing for fifteen minutes on a rigged computer task. After a winner was determined, all participants were assessed on their mood states through a standardized psychometric instrument (PANAS-X). Among winners of a rigged videogame competition, we found a significant interaction between testosterone and self-assurance in relation to post-competition cortisol. Specifically, self-assurance was associated with lower post-competition cortisol in subjects with high baseline testosterone levels, but no such relationship was observed in subjects with lower baseline testosterone levels. In losers of the competition no interaction effect between basal testosterone and hostility was observed. However, in this subgroup a significant negative relationship between basal testosterone and post-competition cortisol was evident. Overall, these findings provide initial support for the novel hypothesis that biological motivational predispositions (i.e. basal testosterone) and state (i.e. mood changes) may interact in regulating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activation after a social contest.
Highlights
Dominance contests are ubiquitous, recurrent causes of stress among mammalian species
On the basis of Box-plot inspection, which makes no assumption about the data distribution [41], outliers were identified in both baseline cortisol (n = 4, two losers) and baseline testosterone (n = 1, one loser)
2) we did not observe a significant increase in the amount of variance explained [D F (2,22) = 2.876, ns, D R2 = 0.48], while adding the interaction between basal testosterone and selfassurance in Step 3 increased the amount of variance explained in predicting post-competition cortisol [D F (1,21) = 4.626, p,.05, D R2 = .033]
Summary
Recurrent causes of stress among mammalian species. Because of the link between baseline testosterone and status-seeking behavior [10] and testosterone’s correlation with implicit power motivation [11], Mehta and colleagues [9] proposed basal testosterone as an additional regulator of the HPA reactivity to social victory and defeat Results of their experiments showed that only in high testosterone individuals was cortisol affected by the outcome of the competition. While low testosterone participants did not experience any change in cortisol after the competition, supposedly because of the absence of preference for status in this subgroup, high testosterone individuals experienced a decrease in cortisol after winning, but an increase in cortisol after losing These physiological responses appeared to regulate subsequent behaviors, such that only high testosterone winners decided to repeat the competition, highlighting the importance of including measures of baseline testosterone in further investigation of HPA activation in dominance contests
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