Salivary testosterone and simple reaction time parameters

A study on 64 healthy young men was carried out to investigate the relationships between salivary testosterone (TS) levels and simple reaction time (RT) parameters under baseline and experimental stress conditions. Two similar simple RT tasks during an anticipation period (test 1, without feedback) and a stress period (test 2, feedback) were used. Electric skin shocks (test 2) were either given contingently to previous performance or noncontingently using a yoked design. Saliva samples obtained during the baseline period were used to split the sample into groups of low and high TS levels according to the median. As expected, lower TS baseline levels were associated with higher mean RT and intraindividual standard deviations. Furthermore, lower TS levels combined with noncontingent feedback resulted in larger numbers of passive avoidance reactions.