Trusting and Oxytocin
May 27, 2008 1:13 pm Science, SocietyMy wife was taking her usual 45 minute shower yesterday before we were to go up to her parent’s place for a Memorial Day grill out. Knowing I’d have ample time to kill, I started surfing the net and soon stumbled upon at advertisement for something called “Liquid Trust Enhanced”. Mildly intrigued, I clicked on the link for the product’s website.
The website declared that Liquid Trust Enhanced “has been specially designed to give a boost to the dating and relationship area of your life.” It went on to say that for the first time in your life, you can create a TRUSTING and PASSIONATE atmosphere. The stuff comes in a nasal spray bottle. I guess that once you shoot it up your honker, you instantly trust everbody around you and everybody trusts you- when they smell it on you. Heh heh.
Gee, it certainly sounds stronger than that pungent Axe armpit stuff so many guys are wearing these days to attract the ladies.
I don’t know if the claims of that website are true or not. I’m skeptical, to say the least. But what I found that was more fascinating was that one of the ingredients is something called oxytocin. And oxycotin is very real.
Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone that also acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain. Oxytocin is thought to be released during hugging, touching and orgasm in both sexes. In the brain, it is involved in social recognition and bonding. Pitocin and Syntocin are synthetic forms of Oxytocin and are sold as medication.
Upon further study, I found that Swiss researchers have shown that the hormone, first discovered for its role in labor, birth and breastfeeding, actually helps people to learn to trust again after betrayal.
“When trust has been broken, something has to allow you to move on with your life and learn to trust again,” says Mauricio Delgado, a cognitive neuroscientist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. That something is oxytocin, according to Delgado.
The chemical is important in being able to balance forgiving and forgetting with learning from mistakes, he says.
Researchers led by Thomas Baumgartner at the University of Zurich in Switzerland gathered 49 male volunteers to play games of trust and risk while in an fMRI scanner. Some of the volunteers got a nasal spray of oxytocin, while the rest received a squirt of placebo. The men could not tell the difference between the two nasal sprays.
Let The Games of Trust Begin
Baumgartner began testing his theories about the effects of oxycotin by creating games for his volunteers. The game involved the volunteers “investing” money (provided by the researchers) with a trustee. Half the time the trustee would share money with the investor. The rest of the time, the trustee pocketed all of the cash, violating the investor’s trust. In the other game, the volunteers played the lottery. This lottery paid off half the time just like the investment with the trustee, but the men didn’t feel betrayed if the lottery didn’t pay off. Researchers used the lottery game to determine how likely the men were to take risks.
The men that got the placebo spray, after being “betrayed” by the trustee, were less likely to want to invest with a new trustee. The men that got the oxycotin were quicker to hand over money to another trustee.
Brain scans of the volunteers revealed that oxytocin dampened activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that helps regulate emotions such as fear. The amygdala has been shown to be involved with judging the trustworthiness of faces, but the new study is the first to show that oxytocin can alter activity in that part of the brain during a trust exercise, Baumgartner says.
The study helps to show oxytocin’s role in people’s general trust for other human beings after being betrayed, but does not show how oxytocin alters the outlook of a relationship when a family member, mate or friend screws you over and betrays that trust. The study also took place under controlled laboratory conditions and doesn’t address what happens in the real world.
In other words, oxycotin may encourage or heighten one’s ability to trust, but trust is not guaranteed by a squirt up the nose. There are just too many factors in play when it comes to the complex behavior of human beings.
From the author of http://psychocarnival.blogspot.com/
