Oxytocin: 'Love Hormone' Makes you more Accepting of Others

A recent study reveals how oxytocin could potentially make us more accepting of others.

What's previously been referred to as the 'love hormone' due to its ability to promote mother-infant attachment and romantic bonding in adults, could actually make us more understanding and accepting of those around us.

Lead study author Dr. Markus Heinrichs from the Department of Psychology at the University of Freiburg in Germany and Dr. Colonnello found that this hormone works to sharpen the brain's self-other differentiation. This is a function that commonly shows a crucial role in social bonding and supports empathic responses in social cognitition.

"Social bonding, mutual support, mate preference and parental investment," said Dr. Colonnello, via a press release, "are all mediated by the oxytocinergic system, which is heavily reliant on a person's ability to appreciate that self and others are both different and valuable."

The study notes that participants were shown videos of their own face that was morphed into an unfamiliar image and vice versa. After which, they were then instructed to press a button as soon as they felt that they saw more features belonging to their certain face. The 44 participants given oxytocin before the task were significantly faster at identifying the face, regardless of whether it was their own or a strangers'.

Yet the placebo group were more likely to rate their own face as being more pleasant looking than an unfamiliar face. However, the oxytocin-treated participants were rated both their own face and other faces as similarly pleasant.

"The results of these studies advance our understanding of the role of the oxytocinergic system and could have far-reaching implications in the area of mother-infant bonding, the treatment of social disorders and for relationships in general," added Dr. Colonnello.

The study concludes with the following, via the release: "The ability to differentiate self from other - a concept that dates back to Freudian theory - remains one of the commonly used markers of early child brain development. Freud originally theorized that both the creation and sensation of a sense of self, as distinct from a sense of others, and the ability to tolerate emotions in self and others were developmental tasks of the Latency phase of child brain development.

"These ideas were further investigated by attachment theorists who, backed up by subsequent clinical studies, found that better self-other differentiation and a greater interest in unfamiliar others were also positively associated with feelings of emotional confidence and feelings of security

"Conversely, a diminished ability to discriminate whether stimuli are related to the self or to others is associated with deficits in interpersonal interactions often seen in various psychopathologies."

What do you think?

More information regarding the study can be found via Psychoneuroendocrinology.