By: Joseph Serwach, U-M News Service
Monday, May 12, 2008

From the article:

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—New University of Michigan psychology research suggests that the sex hormone estrogen may be for women what testosterone is for men: The fuel of power.

Until recently, some researchers doubted whether women had a biologically anchored need for dominance.

"Women have long been overlooked in biological research on dominance," said psychology researcher Steven Stanton. "Using a male model, the small body of existing research has struggled to link testosterone to dominance motivation and behavior in women.

"However, estrogen is very behaviorally potent and is actually a close hormonal relative to testosterone. In female mammals, estrogen has been tied to dominance, but there has been scant research examining the behavioral roles of estrogen in women."

The study by Oliver Shultheiss, a psychology professor who directs the Human Motivation & Affective Neuroscience Lab, and Stanton, who is completing doctoral work at the lab, is detailed this month in the journal Hormones and Behavior.

Schultheiss and Stanton measured women's power needs and then assessed salivary estrogen levels both before and after they entered a one-on-one dominance contest.

The researchers found that even before women got involved in the contest, higher power motivation was associated with higher levels of estrogen....

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To read the entire news release, see the U-M News Service website at http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6524.