Preliminary evidence that androgen signaling is correlated with men's everyday language

Mascaro, Jennifer S.; Rentscher, Kelly E.; Hackett, Patrick D.; Lori, Adriana; Darcher, Alana; Rilling, James K.; Mehl, Matthias R.

doi:10.1002/ajhb.23136

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 86 publications

(92 reference statements)

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“…use and other sexually dimorphic phenotypes (Hoskin and Meldrum, 2018;Mascaro et al, 2018;Archer, 2019;Luoto et al, 2019a), providing a biological basis for the emergence of sexually differentiated traits. Many lines of research, including longitudinal research in humans, support this theory.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the slightly higher frequency of anger-related words in male authors' novels (d = 0.32, Figure 1) does have some equivalents in psychological research. The use of anger-related words is positively correlated with circulating testosterone levels and with polymorphisms in the androgen receptor gene (Mascaro et al, 2018), which make cells more susceptible to the masculinising influence of testosterone. These findings indicate the existence of a plausible biological mechanism (Geniole et al, 2019;Luoto et al, 2019a) which creates sex differences in anger-related language use as well as other psychobehavioural sex differences, including peoplethings orientation, risk-taking, and theory of mind (Khorashad et al, 2018;Luoto, 2020b;Vaskinn et al, 2020;Luoto and Varella, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sexual Dimorphism in Language, and the Gender Shift Hypothesis of Homosexuality

Luoto

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Psychological sex differences have been studied scientifically for more than a century, yet linguists still debate about the existence, magnitude, and causes of such differences in language use. Advances in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shown the importance of sex and sexual orientation for various psychobehavioural traits, but the extent to which such differences manifest in language use is largely unexplored. Using computerised text analysis (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC 2015), this study found substantial psycholinguistic sexual dimorphism in a large corpus of English-language novels (n = 304) by heterosexual authors. The psycholinguistic sex differences largely aligned with known psychological sex differences, such as empathising–systemising, people–things orientation, and men’s more pronounced spatial cognitive styles and abilities. Furthermore, consistent with predictions from cognitive neuroscience, novels (n = 158) by lesbian authors showed minor signs of psycholinguistic masculinisation, while novels (n = 167) by homosexual men had a female-typical psycholinguistic pattern, supporting the gender shift hypothesis of homosexuality. The findings on this large corpus of 66.9 million words indicate how psychological group differences based on sex and sexual orientation manifest in language use in two centuries of literary art.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexual Dimorphism in Language, and the Gender Shift Hypothesis of Homosexuality

Luoto

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…Although lower F0 may be linked to higher testosterone circulating levels (Dabbs & Mallinger, 1999;Evans, Neave, Wakelin, & Hamilton, 2008), the immuno-handicap principle has yielded mixed results in humans (Roberts, Buchanan, & Evans, 2004;Boonekamp et al, 2008). Nonetheless, it has been reported that men plasma testosterone levels were positively correlated with sexual language and the use of swear words in the presence of their partners (Mascaro et al, 2018). Additionally, bioavailable testosterone was also found to be associated with the sound pressure level of the normal speaking voice in men and the softest speaking voice in women (Jost et al 2018).…”

Section: The Underlying Biological Quality Of Voicementioning

confidence: 99%

Voice, Sexual Selection, and Reproductive Success

Suire¹,

Raymond²,

Barkat‐Defradas³

2020

Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics

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Beyond the linguistic content it conveys, voice is one of the fundamental aspects of human communication. It conveys an array of bio-psycho-social information about a speaker and enables the expression of a wide range of emotional and affective states so as to elicit a whole range of auditory impressions. Such aspects are of a great importance in determining the outcomes of competitive and courtship interactions as they influence the access to mating partners and thus reproduction. Sexual selection, the mechanism that promotes biological and social traits that confer a reproductive benefit, provides an interesting theoretical framework to understand the functional role of the human voice from an evolutionary perspective. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the research that lies at the crossroad of the human voice and evolutionary biology. Evolutionary Background Sexual SelectionSexual selection is an evolutionary process by which a specific trait, either biological or social, is selected depending on the advantages it confers to the individual that bears it in order to access sexual partners for reproduction (Darwin, 1871). Reproductive

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“…One source of inspiration for research aiming at biology-based models is that ‘[a]dvances in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary science have increased our knowledge of mammalian sexual differentiation of the brain and how this process creates sex differences […] in various psychobehavioural traits in humans […], but the way in which such differences may be reflected in language use is not well known’ (Luoto, 2021: 1). A study by Mascaro et al (2018: 1) provided ‘preliminary evidence’ that higher testosterone levels in men ‘may influence social behavior by increasing frequency of words related to aggression, sexuality, and status, and that it may alter the quality of interactions with an intimate partner by amplifying emotions via swearing’. A related line of thought is that differences in language use between the genders correspond to underlying features of their psychology and cognitive styles: ‘Differences in the use of function words reflect differences in the ways that individuals think about and relate to the world.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Author gender and text characteristics in contemporary Swedish fiction

Dahllöf

2023

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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The present study addresses the question of to what extent and how authors’ gender is reflected in the textual properties of bestselling fiction in Swedish during the period 2015–2020. The empirical material was a corpus of 235 female-authored books and 214 male-authored works. The analysis of the texts departed from text property measures targeting grammatical and lexical aspects of language use. Differences between the genders were analysed using the probability of superiority measure in combination with a threshold criterion. The results suggest that authors of bestselling fiction in the Swedish book market to a high degree engage in forms of gender performance when they compose their texts. The differences could in most cases be interpreted as conforming to patterns that have previously been reported for other languages and categories of language use. The gender performance to a large extent agreed with traditional stereotypes about the interests of women and men. There were also differences in grammar-related stylistic preferences. Among the female themes, positive emotion and social interaction were prominent. The male examples include weapons and animosity, as well as numerical quantification. A more grammar-related tendency is that male authors tend to package a larger fraction of their text into noun phrases.

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Preliminary evidence that androgen signaling is correlated with men's everyday language

Abstract: Together, these results suggest that T may influence social behavior by increasing the frequency of words related to aggression, sexuality, and status, and that it may alter the quality of interactions with an intimate partner by amplifying emotions via swearing.

Cited by 10 publications

References 86 publications

Sexual Dimorphism in Language, and the Gender Shift Hypothesis of Homosexuality

Sexual Dimorphism in Language, and the Gender Shift Hypothesis of Homosexuality

Voice, Sexual Selection, and Reproductive Success

Author gender and text characteristics in contemporary Swedish fiction

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