Oxytocin – Oxytocin Blog – Oxytocin Research and News

Hopes that oxytocin may be a cure-all for disorders ranging from shyness to autism appear to have taken a blow with the publication of two different studies over the last month.

Links between oxytocin and increased feelings of trust and empathy have been documented for some time, leading many to speculate that the ‘love hormone’ could form the basis of treatments of such social functioning disorders as autism.

However, it increasingly appears that oxytocin may have a dark side as well, and that its effect on social interaction is not necessarily always positive.

In the first study, Dutch researchers found that oxytocin increased the in-group/out-group mentality in a person, even to the point of increasing racist feelings towards non-Dutch nationals.

But perhaps even more disturbingly, New York medical school researchers claim to have demonstrated that oxytocin simply increases ones existing capacity to feel trust or suspicion.  Jennifer Bartz set up a social co-operation gaming experiment with both healthy and psychologically ‘unhealthy’ volunteers.  Those with borderline personality disorder left the game earlier if they had been given an dose of oxytocin nasal spray.

Her team studied 14 people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and 13 volunteers with no psychiatric conditions. Symptoms of borderline personality disorder include severe insecurity about relationships, fears of abandonment and constant, needy reassurance-seeking from partners.

Borderline personality disorder usually occurs in women, but Bartz’s sample included four men. Her group of healthy participants included seven men.

Members of each group played a computer game with an experimenter posing as a research volunteer. In each of three rounds, volunteers had to predict whether their partner would cooperate with them, so that each player could make $6, or if the partner would leave the game in order to claim $4 alone.

Volunteers who suspected the partner of bad intent could leave the game early and claim $4 for themselves.

Borderline personality players of both sexes left the game early far more often after receiving an oxytocin nasal spray than after whiffing a placebo spray. Inhaling the hormone prodded their already high levels of hostile suspicion and depleted minimal reserves of trust, Bartz suggests.

Autism has again been linked to a malfunctioning ability of the bodies oxytocin receptors.  A team at Duke University Medical Center has established a relationship between the oxytocin receptor gene and autism.  What is novel about this research finding appears to be that the relationship does not concern the DNA sequence itself within the gene, but the gene ‘signature’ that determines whether the gene is switched on or off.

These results provide a possible explanation of why social isolation forms part of the autism spectrum — because an autistic individual’s ability to respond to oxytocin may be limited. Oxytocin has been tied to levels of trust and ability to read social cues.

A research group in Canada has found that infant mice raised apart from their fathers grew up with less oxytocin in their brain’s and a consequent impaired ability be social and feel positive in the company of other mice.  The study follows another which showed that fathers experience a huge surge of oxytocin after a child is born, leading some to believe that fathers play a crucial role in the development of their children.

Researchers have discovered that girlie talk raises oxytocin and lowers stress levels in young women. A team working at the University of Michigan, examined progesterone levels in the saliva of 160 college students in order to indirectly measure their oxytocin levels (oxytocin can only be measured by spinal fluid or brain scans). The students were then asked to work in pairs at a task that was either emotionally neutral or a task that required emotional closeness. Those given the latter tasks were found to have raised progesterone (an by inference, oxytocin) and reduced cortisal levels (a stress hormone).