ABSTRACT
It’s great to be able to write about my favorite topic: sex and the brain. In this chapter, I will address how reproductive steroids can provide spectacular insights into the mechanisms underlying affective regulation and dysregulation and help us address what is arguably the most important question in psychiatry and medicine in general: “Why do different people respond differently to the same stimulus?” Now I warn you that I am going to assault you with details, so let me ask only that you abstract the big picture concepts. And those concepts are differential sensitivity, susceptibility, and context. Ultimately, everything in physiology is context-dependent, and failure to ignore context results in inappropriate inferences about how biology works and about how behavior works.
