Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 30, Issue 4, Pages 481-494Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0956797619826970
Keywords
testosterone; aggression; androgen receptor; reward; dopamine; nongenomic; open data
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Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) [RGPIN-2014-06676]
- Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation Grant
- NSERC [RGPIN-2016-05706]
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada
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Little is known about the neurobiological pathways through which testosterone promotes aggression or about the people in whom this effect is observed. Using a psychopharmacogenetic approach, we found that testosterone increases aggression in men (N = 308) with select personality profiles and that these effects are further enhanced among those with fewer cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG) repeats in exon 1 of the androgen receptor (AR) gene, a polymorphism associated with increased AR efficiency. Testosterone's effects were rapid (similar to 30 min after administration) and mediated, in part, by subjective reward associated with aggression. Testosterone thus appears to promote human aggression through an AR-related mechanism and to have stronger effects in men with the select personality profiles because it more strongly upregulates the subjective pleasure they derive from aggression. Given other evidence that testosterone regulates reward through dopaminergic pathways, and that the sensitivity of such pathways is enhanced among individuals with the personality profiles we identified, our findings may also implicate dopaminergic processes in testosterone's heterogeneous effects on aggression.
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