London, United Kingdom. Women understand how testosterone affects behavior but the lack of hard scientific data relegates female insights to the social margins, a situation subject to change as scientific interest has ramped up in recent years.

Recent research shows how testosterone can make an individual overvalue their own opinions at the expense of cooperation, leading affected individuals to dominate group decisions.

Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Researchers say the illusion of courage is to plan for risks but then turn away when the moment of truth arrives, an example of an "empathy gap"— an inability to imagine how we will behave in future emotional situations.

According to the empathy gap theory, when the moment of truth is far off you aren't feeling, and therefore are out of touch with, the fear you are likely to experience when push comes to shove.

Washington, DC, USA. Sex ratios influence financial decisions, so that a scarcity of women leads men to become impulsive, save less, and increase their borrowing.

The findings defy conventional economics that tells us humans are not like animals because we make decisions by carefully thinking through our choices. One problem: humans — by definition — are animals.

Durham, NC, USA. Oxytocin, the so-called love hormone that builds mother-baby bonds and may help us feel more connected toward one another, can also make surly monkeys treat each other more kindly.

Administering the hormone nasally through a kid-sized nebulizer, like a gas mask, researchers have shown that it can make rhesus macaques pay more attention to each other and make choices that give another monkey a squirt of fruit juice, even when they don't get one themselves.

Austin, TX, USA. A new study hypothesizes that evolution might favor men who incorrectly read a woman's sexual cues.

But males can be very optimistic when it comes to reading a females's interest. How can he know for sure whether she does or she doesn't? Sexual cues are ambiguous and confounding. Most of us — and especially men — often read them wrong.