Add Testosterone Insult to Election Injury

Vote for a winner if you want to keep your pre-election testosterone levels intact.

New research out of the University of Michigan and Duke University shows that "young men who voted for Republican John McCain or Libertarian candidate Robert Barr in the 2008 presidential election suffered an immediate drop in testosterone when the election results were announced," according to an article on Duke University's Web site by Karl Lief Bates.

If you cast your vote for Barack Obama, make that President Obama, you probably had "stable testosterone levels immediately after the outcome."

And that held true for women who took part in the testosterone work.

"This is a pretty powerful result," Kevin LaBar, a professor of neuroscience at Duke, told Bates. "Voters are physiologically affected by having their candidate win or lose an election."

Bates writes that the findings "mirror what other studies have found in men who participate directly in an interpersonal contest — the winner gets a boost of testosterone, while the loser's testosterone drops." A journal article on the study appears in the most recent issue of PLoS ONE.

The researchers, in Durham, N.C., and Ann Arbor, Mich., had more than 180 men and women "chew a piece of gum and then spit into a sample tube at ... as the polls closed on Nov. 4, 2008," Bates writes. "When the election results were announced at about 11:30 p.m., the subjects provided a second sample, and then two more at 20-minute intervals. Those spit samples were then analyzed for concentrations of testosterone and some related stress hormones."

McCain supporters lost the testosterone contest.

According to the ABC News affiliate in Durham, a "questionnaire given to the participants after the election showed the McCain supporters felt unhappy, submissive and more controlled" than those who voted for Obama.

"Voters participate in elections both directly by casting their ballots, and vicariously because they don't personally win or lose the election," Steven Stanton, a Duke post-graduate student, told Bates. "This makes democratic political elections highly unique dominance contests."

The researchers plan to repeat the study, this time using fans of Duke and University of North Carolina basketball teams, to see whether the winning team boosts fans' hormones.

Photo courtesy of World Economic Forum, via flickr