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Oestrogen levels shot up in power-motivated women when they won and plummeted when they lost, while the opposite was true in women who appeared not to be interested in power, the researchers found.
"The biology of dominance in women has been vastly under- researched. On top of that, it sets up very nice parallels with men and testosterone," said Steven Stanton of the University of Michigan, who conducted the study.
Earlier this month, British researchers reported that male financial traders made more money when their testosterone levels were high. Stanton, working under the guidance of German researcher Oliver Schultheiss of Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, wanted to see if oestrogen or testosterone was affected when women competed.
How the study was done
"We put women in this study in a face-to-face contest where they competed on a computer task for 10 rounds," Stanton said. "Following each round, they were told whether they won or lost and they could watch each other's reaction to winning or losing."
Saliva samples were taken to measure their hormone levels. "Even before the contest started, we have this measure of power motivation or dominance motivation that we use," he added.
Volunteers are shown a neutral picture and asked to write a short story about it. "We look for themes that are related to power. The more power themes that someone writes about, the more power-motivated that we consider them," said Stanton.
Oestrogen was linked to personality type as well, Stanton said - and the women, mostly in their 20s, were evenly divided. "The higher the women were in oestrogen, they higher they were in this measure of power motivation," he said.
"To sum up, we have found that estradiol (oestrogen), but not testosterone, and a non-conscious need for dominance are positively related in women. This positive relationship is strongest in single women (and) women not taking oral contraceptives," they wrote in the journal Hormones and Behaviour.
Further tests planned for menopausal women
Women who seemed to have less of a need to dominate were affected differently, Stanton said. "It was almost a flip-flop of the result. Those who were not power-motivated, if they won, their oestrogen went down. If they lost, their oestrogen went up a little bit," he said.
"Oestrogen is very behaviourally potent and is actually a close hormonal relative to testosterone. In female mammals, oestrogen has been tied to dominance, but there has been scant research examining the behavioural roles of oestrogen in women," added Stanton.
He hopes also to test women past menopause, whose bodies produce less oestrogen, and also to test men and women as they compete against one another. – (ReutersHealth)
May 2008
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