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Oral Contraception Study

What about hormones later in development.

One way to study the behavioral and cognitive effects of current hormone levels is to compare women who use oral contraceptives (OCs; “the pill”) to those who do not. In our study, we compared women to see if these hormones affect sex-typed cognitive abilities. We also compared women using different types of OCs, since OCs vary by the type of hormones they contain and whether they deliver a constant or changing amount of these hormones.  Most previous work did not account for these factors. We found that one hormone component, ethinyl estradiol, influences one aspect of spatial ability. Performance on a mental rotation task was negatively correlated with ethinyl estradiol levels, and women using monophasic OCs (N = 55) outperformed naturally cycling women (N = 93). Expressional fluency was also affected by type of OC use, with women using monophasic OCs outperforming women using triphasic OCs (N = 43).

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Click here to go to the IRB website

This research was completed at Penn State with student participants. We are grateful to the university for supporting and facilitating research with human participants. For more information about how Penn State protects participants, check out their Institutional Review Board website.  

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