Testosterone plays important roles in reproductive behaviour in many species. Despite a common belief that testosterone regulates fluctuations in human sexual desire, there is little direct evidence that relates within-person changes in natural testosterone production to within-person changes in sexual desire. Here, we measured daily salivary testosterone concentrations from 41 adult men for one month, along with daily self-reports of sexual desire (n = 759 observations for the main analyses). We analysed concurrent relationships between within-person changes in testosterone and desire, and also lagged relationships that were analysed using a continuous-time modelling framework. We found no evidence for significant, positive relationships between testosterone and desire, which argues against the notion that day-to-day changes in eugonadal men’s baseline testosterone regulates changes in their sexual desire. However, additional analyses provided preliminary evidence for a positive relationship between testosterone and self-reported courtship effort, particularly on days when single participants interacted with potential romantic partners. Our findings add original evidence regarding day-to-day associations between testosterone and desire, and suggest that testosterone above minimum threshold concentrations does not increase sexual desire. We propose that the evolved functions of testosterone in human males are more closely associated with courtship efforts than with sexual desire.
my doctor said my T was on the low end of normal so he gave me this gel that you put a bit of on your skin every day. I did notice that my sex drive had been quite low for a week or so sometime before that. turns out it was probably just from the mild depression!
anyway I have found the receptionist at work hotter than normal, but she was dressed up to go out for a christmas party
41 adult men aged 18 to 26 (M = 20.17, s.d. = 2.16) recruited from a subject pool at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
So not representative of adults / the overall population, but still interesting.
Sexual desire was assessed as a composite score from three questions: (i) ‘Yesterday, how much did you have sexual thoughts?’ (ii) ‘Yesterday, how much did you have sexual fantasies?’ (iii) ‘Yesterday, how much sexual desire did you experience?’
First, a single item inquired about overall mate attraction efforts on each day: ‘How much effort did you put into attracting a possible romantic and/or sexual partner yesterday?’ (same 1–7 scale as above). Second, because such efforts may be highly dependent on social exposure to potential partners, we also targeted a binary measure of such exposure: ‘Yesterday, did you have a direct social interaction with anyone you found attractive as a potential romantic and/or sexual partner, but who was not your romantic or sexual partner at the time?’ (Yes/No).
Not a lot that’s quantitative. But I guess I would expect to answer those questions differently over the course of a month.
Testosterone is a hell of a drug!
