A Study Of The Competitive Attitudes In Young Female Students,revisit The Role Of Cortisol And Testosterone

The competitive attitudes reflects the individuals' intrinsic competitive need and desire which dominate their explicit behaviors in different forms of competition.The competitive attitudes have been divided into hypercompetitive attitude(HCA)and personal development competitive attitude(PDCA).Field competition studies revealed that testosterone,an androgenic steroid hormone,and cortisol,a glucocorticoid hormone are involved in the regulation of competitive behaviors,however,the correlation of these hormones with individuals' competitive attitudes still remains unknown.Thus,we initiated the current study,and the aims of this study are 1)to identify the characteristics of competitive attitudes in female students;2)to investigate the biological mechanisms for the competitive attitudes;3)to explore the dynamic alteration of competitive attitudes by a follow-up study in the same participants.One hundred forty-seven female college students(age: M ± SD =18.37 ± 0.853 years)were enrolled to participate this study from 2017 to 2019.The competitive attitudes of these participants were assessed by deploying questionnaire of the Competitive Attitudes Scale(Chinese version)in 2017 and 2019 respectively.Salivary testosterone and cortisol levels were collected before the surveys and determined by using commercially available ELISA kit.The data were analyzed by simple linear regression with SPSS software and hierarchical linear modeling(HLM)with HLM7.0.The results indicated that 1)The salivary cortisol was positively related to the HCA(? = 0.183,R 2 = 0.034,t = 2.164,p = 0.032)but not PDCA(?=-0.015,R 2 <0.001,t =-0.180,p = 0.857);The salivary testosterone did not show any correlation with either HCA(?=-0.008,R 2 <0.001,t =-0.099,p = 0.921)or PDCA(?=-0.056,R 2 = 0.003,t=-0.652,p = 0.516).the testosterone/cortisol(T/C)was negatively related to the HCA(? =-0.176,R 2 = 0.031,t =-2.073,p = 0.040)but not to the PDCA(? =-0.034,R 2 = 0.01,t =-0.394,p = 0.694);2)In the follow-up study,we found that the salivary cortisol was involved in the alteration of the HCA(? = 3.209,t = 2.514,p = 0.013)but no effects on the changes of PDCA(? =-0.824,t =-0.468,p = 0.641).The testosterone had no effects on the changes of either PDCA or HCA.The T/C level affected on the changes of HCA(? =-2.241,t =-2.417,p = 0.017)but not for the alterations of PDCA(? = 1.203,t = 1.196,p = 0.234).In summary,we concluded that the cortisol,a stress hormone,is associated with the HCA but not PDCA in young female students.The current results suggested that cortisol may selectively regulate extreme competitive attitude which could lead to potential stressful competition behaviors in young female.