Abstract
We study a relation between distinction and special values of local invariants for representations of the general linear group over a quadratic extension of p-adic fields. We show that the local Rankin-Selberg root number of any pair of distinguished representation is trivial, and as a corollary we obtain an analogue for the global root number of any pair of distinguished cuspidal representations. We further study the extent to which the gamma factor at 1/2 is trivial for distinguished representations as well as the converse problem.