Testosterone administration in women increases the size of their peripersonal space.

Peripersonal space (PPS) is the space immediately surrounding the body, conceptualised as a sensory-motor interface between body and environment. PPS size differs between individuals and contexts, with intrapersonal traits and states, as well as social factors having a determining role on the size of PPS. Testosterone plays an important role in regulating social-motivational behaviour and is known to enhance dominance motivation in an implicit and unconscious manner. We investigated whether the dominance-enhancing effects of testosterone reflect as changes in the representation of PPS in a within-subjects testosterone administration study in women (N = 19). Participants performed a visuo-tactile integration task in a mixed-reality setup. Results indicated that the administration of testosterone caused a significant enlargement of participants' PPS, suggesting that testosterone caused participants to implicitly appropriate a larger space as their own. These findings suggest that the dominance-enhancing effects of testosterone reflect at the level of sensory-motor processing in PPS.

Engaging Communities on Health Innovation: Experiences in Implementing Design Thinking.

Design thinking is an approach gaining momentum as a strategy for promoting empathy-driven, human-centered innovation. To evaluate the implementation of design thinking for engaging with communities about health and well-being, we undertook a qualitative analysis of an engagement between students and relevant community stakeholders during a project to develop a health intervention aimed at increasing medication compliance in an elderly community in South Africa. Major findings from this research indicated that design thinking offers opportunities for enriching community-university engagements. However, given constraints on time and procedure that are associated with the academy, the fast, dynamic style of design thinking is not optimally suited for developing the level of trust and rapport that is required for engagements in communities where social-cultural differences operate as barriers. Researchers who wish to utilize design thinking will need to devise and tailor additions to tool kits to meet the specific needs of engagements related to personal health and well-being.

The Territory of my Body: Testosterone Prevents Limb Cooling in the Rubber Hand Illusion.

The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is an experimental paradigm for assessing changes in body ownership. Recent findings in the field suggest that social emotions can influence such changes and that empathic motivation in particular appears to positively predict the malleability of body representations. Since the steroid hormone, testosterone, is well known to interrupt certain forms of empathic processing, in the current study we investigated whether 0.5 mg of testosterone affected ownership indices of the RHI. Forty-nine females participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment in which the RHI was induced. Compared to placebo, testosterone had no effects on the alteration of subjective ownership over the rubber limb or on subjective sense of proprioceptive drift. However, unlike the placebo group, testosterone-treated participants did not display an objective decline in the temperature of their own (hidden) hand following induction of the illusion. These findings suggest that testosterone strengthens implicit but not explicit bodily self-representations. We propose that effective maintenance of implicit body boundaries can be regarded, conceptually, as a primary defensive state facilitating integrity of the self.

Testosterone facilitates the sense of agency.

Sense of agency (SoA) refers to feelings of being in control of one's actions. Evidence suggests that SoA might contribute towards higher-order feelings of personal control - a key attribute of powerful individuals. Whether testosterone, a steroid hormone linked to power in dominance hierarchies, also influences the SoA is not yet established. In a repeated-measures design, 26 females participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to test the effects of 0.5 mg testosterone on SoA, using an implicit measure based upon perceived shifts in time between a voluntary action and its outcome. Illusions of control, as operationalized by optimism in affective forecasting, were also assessed. Testosterone increased action binding but there was no significant effect on tone binding. Affective forecasting was found to be significantly more positive on testosterone. SoA and optimistic expectations are basic manifestations of power which may contribute to feelings of infallibility often associated with dominance and testosterone.

Social dominance and the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales.

The tendency for cohabiting mammals to organise themselves into dominance hierarchies is a well-documented phenomenon and has consistently been linked to the activity of testosterone and cortisol. However, a systematic account of it within the "basic emotion" taxonomy proposed by Panksepp remains uncharted. The Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS), developed to measure the influence of basic affective systems on human temperamental variability, were used as a tool through which to dissociate incentives that promote social dominance from other personality stereotypes. 36 Males were assayed for baseline testosterone and cortisol. Dominance, conceptualised as an egocentric incentive for gaining social influence, was found to positively correlate with the testosterone: cortisol ratio but not with any existing subscales of the ANPS. While these findings suggest that trait dominance can be monitored as an independent personality variable according to a distinct bodily hormone pattern, whether this reflects a distinguishable synaptic-neuronal chemical profile remains unresolved.