DATE: August 01, 2025 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: How stress affects us may depend on the balance between testosterone and cortisol

URL: psypost.org/how-stress-affects…

A new study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology suggests that the way young men experience psychosocial stress may depend on the balance between two hormones: testosterone and cortisol. The researchers found that higher testosterone was linked to lower perceived stress—but only when cortisol levels were low. Conversely, high cortisol was linked to lower stress perception in those with low testosterone. These findings support the idea that it’s not just individual hormone levels that matter, but how they interact with each other.

Cortisol is a hormone released by the adrenal glands in response to stress. It helps the body regulate blood sugar, metabolism, and the immune response. Cortisol is often called the “stress hormone” because its levels rise when we feel threatened or under pressure. It’s also involved in how we process emotions and recover from stressful experiences.

Testosterone is a hormone commonly associated with male reproductive development, but it also influences behavior. Research has linked testosterone to status-seeking, competitiveness, and dominance-related behaviors. It can also affect mood and emotion regulation. While both men and women produce testosterone and cortisol, levels and their effects can differ by sex.

The interaction between testosterone and cortisol has been explored through the dual-hormone hypothesis, which suggests that high testosterone promotes behaviors aimed at gaining or maintaining social status—but primarily when cortisol is low. When cortisol is high, the drive for status might shift to avoiding loss or may be weakened altogether. This context-dependent version of the hypothesis suggests that cortisol shapes how testosterone affects behavior and emotional responses.

Given that social stress often carries a threat to status—such as being judged or evaluated—it makes sense to examine whether testosterone and cortisol interact to influence how people perceive stressful social situations. Past studies have looked at how these hormones relate to behavior and physiological stress responses, but little was known about how they affect the subjective experience of stress.

“It’s important to remember that dealing with psychosocial stress is often more complex than dealing with physical stress,” said study author Erik Ilkevič, a PhD candidate at Vilnius University. “Our bodies are well-equipped to handle a ‘run from the bear’ situation, but modern stressors can be more challenging and harder to understand. Since psychosocial stress is likely to increase, it’s important for people to learn how to manage it effectively, and for scientists to understand what factors affect our reactions to it.”

“Hormones like cortisol and testosterone, while often linked to physical reactions like stress response and reproduction, also play a significant role in our emotions and social behavior, including how we manage stress. Previous research has shown that cortisol and testosterone interactions affect certain things, but how they affect our perception of stress hadn’t been explored.”

For their study, the researchers recruited 40 healthy young men between the ages of 20 and 28 from Lithuania. After excluding a few participants due to preexisting health issues or sample quality concerns, the final analysis included 37 participants. All participants were screened to ensure they had no major psychological, neurological, or hormonal conditions, and none were taking steroid-based medications.

The participants took part in a stress-inducing experiment called the short Sing-a-Song Stress Test. In this task, they were told they would have to sing their national anthem alone, on camera, while being evaluated by expert judges. Although they were ultimately only asked to sing for three seconds, the anticipation of public singing and evaluation was designed to provoke mild psychological stress.

Before, during, and after the stress task, researchers measured heart rate and breathing patterns to assess physical responses. Participants also gave saliva samples to measure baseline levels of testosterone and cortisol. After the task, they rated how stressful they found the experience using a visual scale.

The researchers also collected information on participants’ sleep, tiredness, mood, and overall stress levels in the past month using standardized questionnaires.

The researchers first confirmed that the task successfully induced stress. While it didn’t significantly raise cortisol levels across the group—suggesting the stressor was relatively mild—it did cause changes in heart rate, a sign of autonomic nervous system activation.

The main question was whether testosterone and cortisol levels before the task could predict how stressful participants perceived the experience to be. The findings showed a clear interaction between the two hormones.

“We were surprised to see significant interactions between testosterone and cortisol on stress perception, even though our study had a relatively small number of participants and the stress we used was fairly mild,” Ilkevič told PsyPost. “This suggests that these hormonal interactions could be quite important, even in everyday situations.”

Among men with low baseline cortisol, higher testosterone was linked to lower ratings of stress. In contrast, when cortisol levels were high, testosterone had no meaningful effect on stress perception. On the other hand, among men with low testosterone, those with higher cortisol reported less stress. But when testosterone was high, cortisol no longer appeared to ease stress perception.

These results were consistent across both traditional statistical models and Bayesian methods, which provide a probabilistic way of interpreting data.

“The main takeaway is that our individual levels of cortisol and testosterone can affect how we experience stressful social situations,” Ilkevič explained. “Specifically, in men, if cortisol levels were relatively low, higher testosterone was linked to feeling less stressed, and vice versa. This suggests that it’s not just about the level of one hormone, but how they interact with each other. We think that men with higher testosterone and lower cortisol might see a stressful task as a challenge instead of a threat, which could help them feel less stressed overall.”

“In simple terms, how stressed you feel in a social situation might depend on the balance of cortisol and testosterone in your body.”

The study focused only on men, and its findings may not apply to women. The researchers chose to do this because previous work showed that testosterone and cortisol interactions are more consistently observed in men.

However, “it’s important to include women in this type of research because they are often underrepresented in neuroscience and health studies,” Ilkevič said. “Additionally, we only looked at testosterone. Since mood disorders are distributed unequally between men and women, and since that could be related to stress perception, future studies should include larger, more diverse groups of people (both men and women) and examine other sex hormones like estrogen and progesterone to get a more complete picture.”

“Our long-term goal is to better understand how stress and sex hormones interact in various social and emotional situations across both sexes. We aim to explore how these hormonal interactions are related to our emotional experiences, ability, and willingness to regulate emotions, as well as our behavior in different social settings.”

The study, “Testosterone and cortisol moderate perception of mild psychosocial stress in young males,” was authored by Erik Ilkevič, Eglė Jašinskaitė, Rimantė Gaižauskaitė, and Ramunė Grikšienė.

URL: psypost.org/how-stress-affects…

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