No evidence that testosterone reduces cognitive empathy

Curious they built up so much steam about refuting past notions... but chose a poor method (viewing actor's eyes). Paul Ekman has noted that assessing the emotional state from a single picture is difficult. Not to mention unless using genuine emotional faces, you're having actors "play" an emotion rather than feel it (Method vs. Mamet style acting ignored)

>Prior to this work, the strongest evidence for a link between testosterone exposure and reduced cognitive empathy came in 2011 in a study that found administering testosterone to healthy women reduced their performance on a test of reading emotions. The results suggested the testosterone impaired their performance.

That's interesting. Adult males typically have 7-8 times the levels that females do, and females are more sensitive to it. I'd hypothesize that injecting females with extra testosterone was just plain mentally disorienting. I know a trans man who, after a few months of testosterone, claimed it was "night and day" in how they felt about and processed the world. Female biology isn't adapted to high levels of testosterone like a males biology is.

I'm so glad this important article shot up to #1 in the HN frontpage.

The relevant definition from the original research paper:

> One important element of social cognition is ‘cognitive empathy’, which constitutes the capacity to infer from observation the emotions, beliefs and goals of others.

Abstract of the original paper:

> The capacity to infer others' mental states (known as ‘mind reading’ and ‘cognitive empathy’) is essential for social interactions across species, and its impairment characterizes psychopathological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. Previous studies reported that testosterone administration impaired cognitive empathy in healthy humans, and that a putative biomarker of prenatal testosterone exposure (finger digit ratios) moderated the effect. However, empirical support for the relationship has relied on small sample studies with mixed evidence. We investigate the reliability and generalizability of the relationship in two large-scale double-blind placebo-controlled experiments in young men (n = 243 and n = 400), using two different testosterone administration protocols. We find no evidence that cognitive empathy is impaired by testosterone administration or associated with digit ratios. With an unprecedented combined sample size, these results counter current theories and previous high-profile reports, and demonstrate that previous investigations of this topic have been statistically underpowered.

From: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.106...