Hormones and Behaviour: A Psychological Approach

摘要

Following a review of the principles of hormone action and basic neuroscience,Chapter 3,"Behavioural Endocrinology," provides a solid, scientific view of some of the important issues in this field of study, such as whether women's intellectual abilities are affected by their menstrual cycle and whether people are "born with" a homosexual orientation.After providing a useful discussion of what is actually meant by "behavior," Neave goes on to explain the two principal ways in which hormones exert their actions on behavior: organizational and activational.The distinction between organizational and activational effects of hormones has been used extensively to discuss the hormones and behavior, but Neave explains why we need to reevaluate this simplistic distinction, which he argues cannot always account for the wide variety of effects produced by hormones. In Chapter 11,Neave also addresses the issue of whether fluctuating levels of hormones have an effect on cognitive functioning, by describing studies that have attempted to correlate hormone levels with cognitive ability and also studies that have examined cognitive performance in relationship to naturally fluctuating hormone levels, for example, during the menopause or the menstrual cycle.