Thursday, February 10, 2011

Turns out more testosterone gets in the way of empathy

The latest from Cambridge and Ulrecht researchers: dosing a girl with a shot of testosterone in the tongue will make her less able to "read minds" (deduce a person's emotions and thinking based on their facial expression, which is a good part of empathy).
This is especially interesting considering that a leading hypothesis to explain autism (marked by mostly absent empathy) is linked to unbalance of pre-natal exposure to androgen, like testosterone.

Then again, maybe the subjects in the study just got a lower score because the testosterone made them stop caring about others' emotions and just want to smash their faces in instead.

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