Digit ratio

Sounds nutty, but what the heck! Don't blame me if I lose my temper or become violent -- my digit ratio made me do it! ;-)

Finger Length Predicts Health and Behavior (Discover): ... In boys, “during fetal development there’s a surge in testosterone in the middle of the second trimester” that seems to influence future health and behavior, says Pete Hurd, a neuroscientist at the University of Alberta. One easy-to-spot result of this flood of testosterone: a ring finger that’s significantly longer than the index finger.

Scientists are not at the point where they can factor in finger length to arrive at a diagnosis, but they’ve gathered evidence that shows how this prenatal hormone imbalance can affect a person for life, from increasing or decreasing your risk of certain diseases, to predicting how easily you get lost or lose your temper. ...

Increased verbal aggression Fq < 1

Improved athletic ability Fq < 1

Improved sense of direction Fq < 1

More physical aggression Fq < 1

More risk taking Fq < 1

Better beta?

It's rough at the top! But, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

I guess I'm an alpha trying to adapt to living beta. Nothing like a steep drop in testosterone level to help with this ...

WSJ: One evening a week, a group of CEOs meets in a Manhattan psychiatrist's office and engages in an ancient ritual. Ostensibly, it is a support group.

Inevitably, it becomes a battle for dominance."Whenever you put alpha males together, the most aggressive will overpower the others," says T. Byram Karasu, the veteran psychiatrist who has run the sessions for the past 23 years. The fighting is subtle, but it's vicious. "Even giving advice is geared toward lowering the others' self-esteem. Those at the lower end of the group come away doubting themselves, and their testosterone falls. They tell me they can't have sex for three or four days afterward."

Alpha males get the girls, but beta males have fewer stress-related health problems, at least among baboons, according to a recent Princeton study. As Melinda Beck explains on Lunch Break, that appears to have health consequences for humans, too.

It isn't easy being an alpha male. Getting to the top and staying there takes a physical toll.

The latest evidence comes from wild baboons in Kenya's Amboseli basin. Researchers from Princeton and Duke universities studied 125 males in five groups over nine years and found that while the alpha males got the best food and the most mates, they experienced far more stress than the beta males just beneath them in the hierarchy, based on the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in fecal samples.

The beta males had almost as many mates and got just as much grooming from others, but they didn't have to spend as much time fighting or following females around to keep other males away.

"Being an alpha is exhausting. I'd rather be a beta," says Laurence Gesquiere, lead author of the study that appeared in the journal Science in July.

In the human savannah, where smarts matter more than brute strength, alphas run companies, amass fortunes and dominate any meeting they're in. They are ambitious, assertive, confident and competitive. "You can smell it in about 30 seconds," says Dr. Karasu, who is psychiatrist-in-chief of Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

... Beta males, by contrast, are nice guys, peacemakers and team players. They make good husbands, fathers and friends. Some experts say they tend to be happier than alphas, since they aren't driven by the need to be on top. Betas can come in many forms—from competent wingmen to extreme introverts who are so determined to avoid conflict they suffer anxiety of their own.

Many observational studies of people and primates have shown that, in general, it's more stressful at the bottom of the social hierarchy than the top. Two long-running studies of British civil-service workers found that people in the lowest ranks had many more health problems and were three times as likely to die as the highest-grade administrators in a 10-year period—even though they all had access to health-care services.

To date, there have been few studies assessing whether human alphas or betas are healthier. ...

Alpha quiz:

Masters of the Universe

In the work world, alpha males are ambitious, assertive, confident and competitive. Here's a quiz that helps define who's an alpha male:

Alpha Strengths

1. No matter what, I don't give up until I reach my end goal.
2. I always say exactly what I think.
3. I have no problem challenging people.
4. I make the decision I believe is correct, even when I know other people don't agree.
5. I seldom have any doubts about my ability to deliver.

Alpha Risks

1. I believe that my value is defined by the results I achieve.
2. I don't care if my actions hurt people's feelings, if that's what's required to produce results.
3. When people disagree with me, I often treat it as a challenge or an affront.
4. If I have a good idea and I'm asked to hold off and listen to inferior ideas, I can quickly become visibly annoyed.
5. People say I become curt, brusque, or frustrated when I have to repeat myself.

Scoring:

If all or nearly all of your responses to statements 1 to 5 were "yes," you are probably an alpha with many of the strengths that make alphas such dynamic and influential leaders.

Fatherhood suppresses testosterone

No wonder I feel so wimpy :-(

NYTimes: ... Testosterone was measured when the men were 21 and single, and again nearly five years later. Although testosterone naturally decreases with age, men who became fathers showed much greater declines, more than double the childless men.

And men who spent more than three hours a day caring for children — playing, feeding, bathing, toileting, reading or dressing them — had the lowest testosterone.

Below is the abstract from the original paper (PNAS).

In species in which males care for young, testosterone (T) is often high during mating periods but then declines to allow for caregiving of resulting offspring. This model may apply to human males, but past human studies of T and fatherhood have been cross-sectional, making it unclear whether fatherhood suppresses T or if men with lower T are more likely to become fathers. Here, we use a large representative study in the Philippines (n = 624) to show that among single nonfathers at baseline (2005) (21.5 ± 0.3 y), men with high waking T were more likely to become partnered fathers by the time of follow-up 4.5 y later (P < 0.05). Men who became partnered fathers then experienced large declines in waking (median: −26%) and evening (median: −34%) T, which were significantly greater than declines in single nonfathers (P < 0.001). Consistent with the hypothesis that child interaction suppresses T, fathers reporting 3 h or more of daily childcare had lower T at follow-up compared with fathers not involved in care (P < 0.05). Using longitudinal data, these findings show that T and reproductive strategy have bidirectional relationships in human males, with high T predicting subsequent mating success but then declining rapidly after men become fathers. Our findings suggest that T mediates tradeoffs between mating and parenting in humans, as seen in other species in which fathers care for young. They also highlight one likely explanation for previously observed health disparities between partnered fathers and single men.

Trading on testosterone

Take with boulder-sized grain of salt. Cause and effect? Only an eight day interval? Couldn't that have been an exceptional period over which aggressiveness paid off?

NYTimes: MOVEMENTS in financial markets are correlated to the levels of hormones in the bodies of male traders, according to a study by two researchers from the University of Cambridge (newscientist.com).

John Coates, a research fellow in neuroscience and finance, and Joe Herbert, a professor of neuroscience, sampled the saliva of 17 traders on a stock trading floor in London two times a day for eight days. They matched the men’s levels of testosterone and cortisol with the amounts of money the men lost or won on the markets. Men with elevated levels of testosterone, a hormone associated with aggression, made more money. When the markets were more volatile, the men showed higher levels of cortisol, considered a “stress hormone.”

But, as New Scientist asked, “which is the cause and which is the effect?”

According to the researchers’ analysis, the men who began their workdays with high levels of testosterone did better than those who did not.

“The popular view is that experienced traders can control their emotions,” Mr. Coates told New Scientist. “But, in fact, their endocrine systems are on fire.”

As with anything else, when it comes to hormones, it is possible to have (from a trader’s perspective) too much of a good thing. Excessive testosterone levels can lead a trader to make irrational decisions.

New Scientist pointed out that although cortisol can help people make more rational decisions during volatile trading periods, too much of it can lead to serious health problems like heart disease and arthritis, and, over time, diminish brain functions like memory.

If individual traders are affected by their hormone levels, does the same hold true for the markets as a whole? After all, the market is nothing more than an aggregate of the individual actions of traders. Mr. Coates thinks it is possible that “bubbles and crashes are coming from these steroids,” according to New Scientist.

If so, “central banks may lower interest rates only to find that traders still refuse to buy risky assets.”

Perhaps, he told New Scientist, “if more women and older men were trading, the markets would be more stable.”