Impact of Sex and Salivary Dehydroepiandrosterone on the Association Between Testosterone and Emotion Dysregulation

Abstract

Adolescence is marked by changes in affect-related processing that allow individuals to learn from, and adapt to, their socioemotional environments. Although this flexibility allows for greater adaptation, it also confers unique vulnerability, marked by a rise in emotion dysregulation and risk for psychopathology. Mounting evidence implicates adolescent changes in pubertal hormones in the emergence of emotion dysregulation and sex differences therein. Specifically, the literature suggests that pubertal hormones influence brain regions relevant to emotion regulation. Despite evidence that these hormones do not operate in isolation (i.e., they can have a modulatory impact on one another), their interactive effects remain largely unexamined in the context of emotion dysregulation. This marks a critical gap in the literature, as examining hormones in isolation overlooks their interdependent effects, thus limiting our ability to interpret their individual contributions. To address this gap, we examined the interactive impact of two key hormones—dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and testosterone—on self-reported emotion dysregulation in adolescents, along with biological sex differences in these relationships. Participants were 73 community adolescents (aged 11–14; 50.7% assigned male at birth, 68.5% White). Analyses revealed a three-way interaction between DHEA, testosterone, and sex (p = 0.010). Probing revealed that higher testosterone was associated with decreased dysregulation but only among female adolescents with higher relative DHEA (p = 0.039). Thus, exposure to relatively higher DHEA may dampen the impact of testosterone on emotion dysregulation. This has implications for understanding the role of hormonal context and sex differences in the onset and maintenance of emotion dysregulation and related psychopathology in adolescence.