Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA; Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA.
Horm Behav. 2021 Apr;130:104934. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2021.104934. Epub 2021 Feb 1.
When current conditions are probabilistically less suitable for successful reproduction than future conditions, females may prevent or delay reproduction until conditions improve. Throughout human evolution, social support was likely crucial to female reproductive success. Women may thus have evolved fertility regulation systems sensitive to cues from the social environment. However, current understanding of how psychological phenomena might affect female ovarian function is limited. In this study, we examined whether cues of reduced social support-social ostracism-impact women's hormone production. Following an in-lab group bonding task, women were randomly assigned to a social exclusion (n = 88) or social inclusion (n = 81) condition. After social exclusion, women with low background levels of social support experienced a decrease in estradiol relative to progesterone. In contrast, socially-included women with low background social support experienced an increase in estradiol relative to progesterone. Hormonal changes in both conditions occurred specifically when women were in their mid-to-late follicular phase, when baseline estradiol is high and progesterone is low. Follow-up analyses revealed that these changes were primarily driven by changes in progesterone, consistent with existing evidence for disruption of ovarian function following adrenal release of follicular-phase progesterone. Results offer support for a potential mechanism by which fecundity could respond adaptively to the loss or lack of social support.
当当前的条件在成功繁殖方面比未来的条件更不适宜时，女性可能会阻止或延迟繁殖，直到条件改善。在人类进化过程中，社会支持可能对女性的生殖成功至关重要。因此，女性可能已经进化出对社会环境线索敏感的生育调节系统。然而，目前对于心理现象如何影响女性卵巢功能的理解是有限的。在这项研究中，我们研究了减少社会支持（社交排斥）的线索是否会影响女性的激素产生。在实验室的团体结合任务之后，女性被随机分配到社会排斥（n=88）或社会包容（n=81）条件中。在社会排斥之后，社会支持背景水平较低的女性的雌二醇水平相对于孕酮水平下降。相比之下，社会包容但社会支持背景水平较低的女性的雌二醇水平相对于孕酮水平增加。这两种情况下的激素变化都发生在女性处于中晚期卵泡期，此时基础雌二醇水平较高而孕酮水平较低。后续分析表明，这些变化主要是由孕酮的变化驱动的，这与卵泡期孕酮从肾上腺释放后卵巢功能紊乱的现有证据一致。结果为生育能力如何适应失去或缺乏社会支持提供了潜在的机制。
