Elsevier

Hormones and Behavior

Volume 49, Issue 3, March 2006, Pages 282-292
Hormones and Behavior

Fetal testosterone and empathy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2005.08.010Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

In animals, fetal testosterone (fT) plays a central role in organizing the brain and in later social behavior. In humans, exposure to atypical levels of prenatal androgens may result in masculine behavior and ability patterns. Normal inter-individual variation in fT levels has also been correlated with later sex-typed behavior.

Methods

In the current study, 38 children (24 male, 14 female), whose fT was analyzed in amniotic fluid, were followed up at age 4. They were asked to describe cartoons with 2 moving triangles whose interactions with each other suggested social relationships and psychological motivations.

Results

Females used more mental and affective state terms to describe the cartoons than males. fT was not associated with the frequency of mental or affective state terms. Females also used more intentional propositions than males. fT was negatively correlated with the frequency of intentional propositions, taking sex differences into account. fT was also negatively correlated with the frequency of intentional propositions when males were examined separately. Males used more neutral propositions than females. fT was directly correlated with the frequency of neutral propositions, taking sex differences into account. This relationship was not seen when males and females were examined separately.

Conclusions

These findings implicate fT in human social development. The relevance of our findings to the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism is also discussed.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were n = 39 children (25 male, 14 female), age 4.0 to 4.25 years, taking part in a long-term study on the effects of fT. These children represent a subset of the 58 children whose mothers completed the Children’s Communication Checklist in our earlier study (Knickmeyer et al., 2005). Many of the families in the sample live several hours from our testing center and given the work schedules of the parents and the fact that all children are enrolled in various schools, traveling for

Results

The first set of analyses provided basic descriptive statistics. Table 3 presents means, standard deviations, and ranges for outcome variables for each sex separately. Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests indicated that ActR was significantly skewed. ActR scores were logged. Where the original score was 0, the logged score was recorded as −2.00. Transformation reduced skewness but increased kurtosis. Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests indicated that ActrR was still significantly skewed. We investigated the

Discussion

In this study, we examined whether fT was related to the tendency to interpret ambiguous visual stimuli in intentional and human terms. This test was used as a measure of mental state attribution, a component of empathy. Typically, developing children were presented with a series of films featuring shapes whose movements were designed to elicit theory of mind attributions and recorded the children’s descriptions. Their narratives were analyzed for the frequency of mental and affective state

Acknowledgments

The reported study was approved by the Eastern Multi-regional Ethics Committee and all relevant local ethics committees. Informed consent was obtained in all cases. None of the authors have a significant financial arrangement, affiliation with, or potential bias against any product or services used or discussed in this paper. We are grateful to the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation for supporting this work. RK was also supported by a British Government Overseas Research Studentship (ORS) and

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