Fetal testosterone and empathy
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were n = 39 children (25 male, 14 female), age 4.0 to 4.25 years, taking part in a long-term study on the effects of fT. These children represent a subset of the 58 children whose mothers completed the Children’s Communication Checklist in our earlier study (Knickmeyer et al., 2005). Many of the families in the sample live several hours from our testing center and given the work schedules of the parents and the fact that all children are enrolled in various schools, traveling for
Results
The first set of analyses provided basic descriptive statistics. Table 3 presents means, standard deviations, and ranges for outcome variables for each sex separately. Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests indicated that ActR was significantly skewed. ActR scores were logged. Where the original score was 0, the logged score was recorded as −2.00. Transformation reduced skewness but increased kurtosis. Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests indicated that ActrR was still significantly skewed. We investigated the
Discussion
In this study, we examined whether fT was related to the tendency to interpret ambiguous visual stimuli in intentional and human terms. This test was used as a measure of mental state attribution, a component of empathy. Typically, developing children were presented with a series of films featuring shapes whose movements were designed to elicit theory of mind attributions and recorded the children’s descriptions. Their narratives were analyzed for the frequency of mental and affective state
Acknowledgments
The reported study was approved by the Eastern Multi-regional Ethics Committee and all relevant local ethics committees. Informed consent was obtained in all cases. None of the authors have a significant financial arrangement, affiliation with, or potential bias against any product or services used or discussed in this paper. We are grateful to the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation for supporting this work. RK was also supported by a British Government Overseas Research Studentship (ORS) and
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