Home games give hormone boost: paper
Testosterone rises; Advantage may be physiological, study suggests
Tom Blackwell, National Post Published: Monday, January 12, 2009

For Mike Bossy, playing against the Flyers in Philadelphia and playing at his New York Islanders home arena in Uniondale, N. Y., was like night and day.

The Philly crowd was outright hostile, making visiting NHL opponents feel real "trepidation," said the ex-New York scoring great. Competing at the Islanders' Nassau Colliseum, on the other hand "made you feel like you had the upper hand right from the outset."

Such home-turf advantage is a well-documented sports phenomenon, but new Canadian research suggests it has as much to do with human biology as psychology, and that coaches may some day be able to induce that physiological response artificially.

Hockey players had much higher levels of testosterone after a winning game on home ice than after a similarly victorious match-up away from home, according to a study published in the American Journal of Human Biology.

It is not clear what triggered the hormone boost. But "a rise in status (i. e. competitive victory) in front of friends and family members may be an especially potent stimulus for the endocrine system," the paper said.

Justin Carre, the PhD pscyhology student at Brock University in St. Catharines, who spearheaded the work, said more recent research, yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, makes an even more intriguing finding. In that study, players only watched a videotape of a game they won on home ice, but experienced a similar spike in testosterone.

More research is needed to confirm and test those findings, but they hint at new possibilities, he said in an interview.

"If you showed a video to a player before a game, you might be able to actually change testosterone levels and that might have a positive effect on performance."

Another study to be published by Mr. Carre and colleagues later this year indicates exactly what impact that higher testosterone concentration could have on athletes.

In an experiment involving puzzles and video games, male players whose testosterone shot up during competition exhibited a higher level of aggression.

The study involving almost 100 men and women is one of the first times that the link between changing hormone levels and behaviour has been shown scientifically, Mr. Carre said.

The graduate student said his research was partly inspired by his own past playing college hockey in the United States, when he experienced that classic jolt from competing at home in front of supporters.

An earlier, 2006, study found a slight difference in testosterone levels in players at the start of home and away games, though neither reading was above normal.

For the more recent research, he measured testosterone levels in the saliva of 10 members of a team of Midget A players in northern Ontario, both before and after games that the squad won.

The pre-game figures were similar between the two match-ups -- one at home, one away --but the post-game levels were more than twice as high after the home-ice victory --and well above normal.

Mr. Bossy, who won four Stanley Cups with the Islanders and had a record nine straight 50-goal seasons, said the home-vs.-away scenario is not completely black and white.

While playing in Philadelphia was intimidating, games in Montreal, his hometown, were much less so, he said.

As for showing videos of winning performances to psyche up athletes, the benefits of that seem obvious, just like "watching Love Story makes you sad and watching Rocky motivates you," Mr. Bossy said.

"If I was playing a game and would have watched myself scoring a hat trick before that, I think it's only natural it would bring positive thoughts before you stepped out on the ice."

I read that male sports fans' testosterone levels decline when their teams lose.

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