Testosterone, Marital Quality, and Role Overload.

In a sample of established working- and middle-class families with school-aged children (N = 307 wives and 307 husbands), neither husbands' nor wives' testosterone showed a direct connection with marital quality. In contrast, the association between husbands' testosterone and positive and negative marital quality (as evaluated by both spouses) was conditional on husbands' role overload. When perceptions of role overload were elevated, higher testosterone levels were associated with lower levels of marital quality. When perceptions of role overload were low, higher testosterone was linked to greater marital quality. The study supports the biosocial model such that, depending on perceptions of the social context, testosterone enables positive behavior in some instances and negative behavior in others. Key Words: biosocial model, marital quality, role overload, testosterone. Social scientists have long assumed that physiological processes are critical components of human behavior, although the nature of many behaviorally relevant biological processes was unknown until recently. Not surprisingly, with only a general regard for the influence of biology, the most well-researched models of human behavior have focused on such issues as how intrinsic dispositions (e.g., temperament, personality) or characteristics of social environments (e.g., quality of social relationships) affect individual and maturational differences (see Bowlby, 1958; Harris, 1957; Lerner, 1986). Those biologists who did study the effects of specific physiological processes employed basic models to reveal the biological determinants of behavior or the unfolding of the predisposed, maturational effects of biology (e.g., puberty) on individual differences. Few of those biological researchers took social variables into account, and when they did, the variables tended to be treated as covariates rather than moderators or mediators (Raine, 2002). Technical and theoretical advances achieved during the 1990s, declared by the U.S. Congress as the "Decade of the Brain," have enabled new opportunities to integrate biological measures into social science. A series of conceptual shifts have placed new emphasis on the contributions of both nature and nurture to individual development (see Magnusson & Cairns, 1996; Plomin & Rutter, 1998; Rutter et al., 1997). Leading the cutting edge of this paradigm shift are behaviorally and socially oriented scientists testing biosocial alternatives to traditional models of individual differences and intraindividual change in behavior. This new biosocial perspective is built upon living systems theory (Ford, 1987). That is, individual differences are considered to be products of individual and interactive influences among genetic, environmental, social, and biological processes over time (Cicchetti & Dawson, 2002). More specifically, Gottlieb (1992) speculates that biological functions set the stage for behavioral adaptation to environmental challenge. Simultaneously, environmental challenges may induce behavioral change that in turn affects fast-acting (e.g., hormone secretion) and slower-responding (e.g., gene expression) biological processes. Importantly, these biological activities are not considered determinants of behavior, rather their action influences the likelihood that preexisting behavioral tendencies are expressed. A central tenet of the overarching model is that the expression of biobehavioral relationships can be amplified or attenuated by social forces. The ability to measure biological variables noninvasively (in saliva) has created many opportunities for behavioral scientists to test biosocial models in the naturalistic settings of everyday social worlds. The additional advantage of this measure is that testosterone levels in saliva reflect the unbound or biologically active fraction of the hormone in circulation (Granger, Schwarz, Booth, & Arentz, 1999). Yet, our review of the literature revealed that with a few notable exceptions (e. …