20. Aggression IV

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Stanford University.

OK, let's get started.

We pick up with aggression, competition, et cetera.

And where have we gotten to?

We are now just about to leap to, instead

of early environment, early hormonal exposure,

parenatal-- hormones both pre, before and after birth.

Around that time, what do they have

to do with adult behavior in these realms?

So, again, this is tapping into that same concept from the sex

lectures-- organizational hormonal effects,

versus activational.

Organizational early in life, setting up the nervous system

to respond later on to some sort of activational hormonal

effect.

So the basic theme that's come through with animal studies

here has been built around, what if you

have females who are prenatally, or perinatally, androgenized,

exposed to high testosterone levels?

And what you see is, basically, the exact same thing

as from the sex lectures, which is

you get a powerful masculinization--

organizational masculinization effect so that later on these

are females who respond to even their low levels

of testosterone in the bloodstream

with increased levels of aggression,

more aggressive play, bunch of measures like that,

less maternal behavior when having offspring-- a pretty

clear literature in terms of prenatal masculinization

of aggressive behavior, as well as sexual behavior.

So, as usual, what about humans?

And we go back to our two diseases

from the other week one was that congenital adrenal hyperplasia

business, that tumor in the mother that produces

vast amounts of, among other things,

an androgen, a testosterone derivative,

which androgenizes the fetus.

Or the case with that drug DES, diethylstilbestrol,