Hug the Monkey

Oxytocin Relieves Anxiety By Acting on the Brain

Every new study seems to fire the excitement about oxytocin. At the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, where Kerstin Uvnas Moberg first identified the role oxytocin plays in reducing anxiety and bonding mother and child, Predrag Petrovic found inhaling it can reduce anxiety.

Petrovic first conditioned subjects by giving them mild electric shocks as they looked at photos of faces. Then, half the subjects inhaled oxytocin and went into the fMRI scanner, which shows what parts of the brain are activated during a particular activity.

According to Science Daily's article,

Using an fMR scanner, the team also found that subjects who had developed shock-induced feelings of anxiety for certain faces exhibited, when shown these faces, higher levels of activity in two brain areas – the amygdale and the ‘fusiform face area’ – that process unpleasant and threatening faces. These activity levels then dropped when they were given oxytocin, but not when given the placebo.

Other experiments have shown decreased activity in the amygdala, thought to be the part of the brain that processes information from the senses and assigns emotional tone to it before sending it up to conscious thought.

How Breastfeeding Helps Mothers Bond

Scientists at Warwick University have modeled the way breastfeeding creates an oxytocin feedback loop that creates the waves of love and peace that many mothers report enjoying while they suckle their babies.

According to the the UK's Mail Online,

... the research team, led by Warwick University scientists, has shown using computer models that when a baby suckles, the mother's neurons respond by churning out the hormone from their dendrites - the part of the cell that usually receives, rather than transmits information.

This extra release of oxytocin creates much stronger links between nerve cells - creating a 'positive-feedback' loop, where the greater the concentration of the chemical, the faster it is produced.

This allows massive, intense, bursts of the love hormone to sweep through the brain at intervals of around five minutes. The findings could shed light on other chemical changes in the brain linked to mood.

Professor Jianfeng Feng, who demonstrated the effect, said: 'We knew that these pulses arise because, during suckling, oxytocin neurons fire together in dramatic synchronised bursts.

'But exactly how these bursts arise has been a major problem that has until now eluded explanation.

This must be an amazing feeling, and I can see how it would create a very deep connection to the baby. I think those of us who haven't experienced this cannot imagine the feeling. I also have to wonder -- just a little? -- about how not experiencing this affects the bonding between mother and baby.

See also, The Mother/Baby Attachment Gap.

Hug Your Monkey Even If You Don't Want Sex

I thought this was a good column from the Times Online: Touching Shouldn't Always Mean Sex.

Relationship expert Pam Spurr points out how hard it can be for male/female couples to send and understand signals about touching. Sometimes, you don't want sex, but you need to be touched and held. She points out:

When our skin is touched, our bodies produce various responses including producing oxytocin, the emotional bonding hormone. This makes us feel good around our loved one. That heart-warming feeling means that we want more of their company. And so the cycle goes on bonding us together.

Interesting that most of the comments are very hostile. I agree it's a bit of a stereotype that he wants sex, she wants to cuddle, but certainly mismatches in how much sex people want are not uncommon.

Fall Out of Love Fast!

Rachel wrote me to ask:

If it weren't for your blog on oxytocin, I would have thought I was going insane. ...Here's the deal:

I met a boy. Gave him my number. He called. When we were both finally free, we got together and hit it off. In fact, we spent 12 hours together on our first date, which was a series of random adventures including going to an outdoor festival, hanging out with my friends and his and eventually ending in a makeout fest with him pushing me into walls and kissing my neck and sucking on my ears generally making me swoon all over this metropolis in which we live. It was hot. It was lovely. But even though I called it a night and we parted and went our separate ways (i.e. no sex), I think I made a huge mistake by making out with him for such a prolonged period of time. 
 
For the whole week after I met the boy, I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. The pleasurable "reverb" was so strong, I literally thought I was going insane. It wasn't until I found your blog that I realized what was going on. I guess because the boy was so skilled and I came to trust him, he ramped up my physical response into something like instant love. Of course I know that I don't love the guy, but now I'm a slave. I need release, because I see the signs. The last time he asked me out he texted me three letters: "Tmw?" He hasn't called me in 5 days. I am not a priority. He just got out of a long-term relationship. Blah blah blah. I know pursuing this further is a mistake and I can handle all of this reality in practical terms, but here is my question: HOW DO I BREAK THE SPELL? How do I get the giddy oxytocin butterflies to knock it off? I need a good night's sleep. Please, oh please, help me.

Dear Rachel:

It sounds like you're in the throes of romantic love, which I believe is different from committed love. Using brain scans, Helen Fisher, author of why we love, found that in the brains of people who were newly, madly in love, it was their motivational centers, not their emotional centers that were in high gear. Her theory, with which I concur, is that the neurochemicals of romantic love are dopamine and norepinephrine, with low levels of serotonin.

It sounds like you've got a classic case.

Oxytocin is probably involved as well; all that touching and making out caused your brain to put out plenty of oxytocin, which activated your social memory, pinning all that excitement and fun to this one particular person. What you need to do now to break the spell is uncouple the giddy effects of dopamine and norepinephrine from this one boy.

Dopamine is the neurochemical of reward, but also of focused attention. It seems to impel us to go after a reward. Right now, you're totally focused on going after the reward of this boy. What other short-term or long-term goals do you have in your life? Now is a time when you can really make some progress on achieving on, because you're so charged up. Norepinephrine will help you in this, because it helps you concentrate and energizes you. If you can't identify a specific goal right now, throw yourself into a project, art, a hobby or a sport.

You can also burn off some of this energy with hard exercise or some equally exciting fun that doesn't involve this boy. I always say bungee jumping, but anything thrilling will refocus your attention nicely.

Finally, you can try to bring yourself down by increasing your oxytocin levels. If you like animals, cuddling with something fuzzy has been shown to calm people down and increase their oxytocin. Hanging out and sharing your feelings with close female friends will also give you a nice oxytocin/estrogen buzz.

And hey, use your brain. You're smart enough to have figured out what's going on; keep reminding yourself that these feelings aren't about him, they're something happening in your body. Be glad about that; it's a wonderful feeling, and it will be even better when it's reciprocated.

Oxytocin Makes You Forget Who Hurt You

Baby Face
Originally uploaded by nep.

A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience amplifies the "oxytocin keeps us trusting after betrayal" theme.

Predrag Petrovic, Raffael Kalisch, Tania Singer, and Raymond J. Dolan of the Wellcome Trust Functional Imaging Laboratory in London found that sniffing oxytocin eliminated a conditioned negative response to a person's face. According to their unsexily named Oxytocin Attenuates Affective Evaluations of Conditioned Faces and Amygdala Activity,"

Using a standard conditioning procedure, we induced differential negative affective ratings in faces exposed to an aversive conditioning compared with nonconditioning manipulation. This differential negative evaluative effect was abolished by treatment with oxytocin, an effect associated with an attenuation of activity in anterior medial temporal and anterior cingulate cortices.

They found that the reduced activity in the amygdala was more pronounced when subjects looked at photos of people looking directly at the camera, and less when the person in the photo was looking to the side. Oxytocin has been shown to reduce the activity of the amygdala, which seems to make snap decisions about whom to trust.

This points to making eye contact as a social signal that it's a situation in which it's appropriate to trust, they say. If so, it explains why people who are good at connecting with others -- as well as scammy people -- make immediate eye contact, and also why we tend to feel negatively toward those who don't meet our eyes.

It could also help explain the mechanism by which we learn the oxytocin response as the person who mothers us gazes into our faces as babies.

NB: This study didn't set off a news frenzy similar to May's "betrayal study," led by Thomas Baumgartner at the University of Zurich, in which people played a game in which they exchange money. It actually seems a bit more exciting, because it deals with faces. Are we experiencing an oxytocin backlash?

Oxytocin Hype and Backlash

I read New York magazine, and they have a regular item called something like "We ride the shifting curve of expectations." They chart where cultural events like books and films fall on the cycle from hype to backlash against the hype.

In the past couple of weeks, I've watched oxytocin follow a similar path. Because I look at every news article and study regarding oxytocin, as well as all the blog posts discovered by a couple blog search tools, I can see what studies spark news coverage, and what kinds of memes spread.

Oxytocin hype has been rampant for the past three weeks. As far as I can tell, it got started with study led by Thomas Baumgartner at the University of Zurich showing that inhaling oxytocin increased people's willingness to trust other players in an economic game, even after they'd been shafted once. This is the team at the University of Zurich that did the very first human oxytocin studies showing that oxytocin increased trust. (Read my blog post about the previous research here.)

In this study, "We find that subjects in the oxytocin group show no change in their trusting behavior after they learned that their trust had been breached several times while subjects receiving placebo decrease their trust."

Some genius copywriter translated this to, "Oxytocin Makes Us Trust after Betrayal," leading to a spate of stories about how "Spray Said to Turn People into Pushovers." And it also led to my appearance on the Fox Morning With Mike and Juliet show.

Not to be outdone, Markus Heinrichs, who leads the Zurich team, talked to reporters (but did not, I believe, actually publish anything new) about their work using oxytocin to treat social anxiety disorder, which has been under way for several years. That sparked another news rush.

They mostly followed the lines of this one, Scientists Find Childbirth Wonder Drug That Can Cure Shyness, kindly sent to me by Blaine. Is that a sexy headline or what? The articles finally recognized the work of Paul Zak, who has been giving oxytocin to humans for several years, without a lot of notice. I didn't blog all these articles, partly because they were so ubiquitous and partly because I was finishing the manuscript of my book, ta daaa!

Already, though, oxytocin hype has faded into the final cycle, backlash. In part this is simply because news reporters have to come up with new stories every day. Once you've written a story hyping the prospects of oxytocin -- or worse, when your competitors have and you haven't -- where do you go from there but to write another one decrying the first. Ideally, at least in the olden days when I started my career as a journalist, you were supposed to find naysayers to quote in every story. But that was then.

The Neurocritic links to an ABC News story now insisting, "Researchers Balk at Media Reports Hyping 'Love Drug' Hormone's Effects."

And Paul Zanucci of American Sentinel calls it, "The Oxytocin Nightmare to Come -- Drugging America." I agree with his premise, and have been saying for a while that oxytocin will be the next Prozac. That is, while oxytocin-based or oxytocin-like drugs will be developed for social anxiety disorder and ASD, it will eventually be prescribed for much milder psychological situations. Zanucci writes,

Every time someone blows their nose, there’s a new prescription written for nasal sprays and antihistamines even though products like Zyrtec can now be bought OTC in generic form.  Every time someone is stressed out by work, another prescription is written for anti-anxiety medication.  People are happy as clams to pay $30 to $50 for the latest in pharmaceutical living, not considering that their insurance is paying another $300 behind the scenes and that their cost for insurance is going to go up again next year.

Nevertheless, I think calling this a nightmare is way too anti-hyperbolic. I'd much rather we revise labor, birth and parenting practices to allow individuals to form a healthy oxytocin response naturally. But our society is probably too sick and mechanistic for that. In which case, a nation of loved-out citizens who inhale oxytocin several times a day would be preferable to our extant war-mongering, paranoid, crabby society.

At any rate, I think we can shortly expect oxytocin to fall off the news cycle for at least a few months.

Mean Like Mommy

A couple of experiments by Dario Maestripieri, a University of Chicago biologist, offer insight into how early mothering affects our brain's chemical responses later in life -- as well as how we develop the urge to mother.
Since the 1990s, Maestripieri has worked with rhesus macaque monkeys. Socially, the rhesus aren't so much like humans. They're non-monogamous; females live in matrilineal groups, sharing food and casually lending a hand with each others' babies. Males hang out with each other, fighting for dominance; they occasionally stop by the females to copulate or steal food. But if you look at the attachment between mother and baby, Maestripieri thinks they're a perfect model: Rhesus females have one baby at a time, and they invest years in their care, just like humans do.

Observing the rhesus colony at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Maestripieri noticed that the rhesus' mothering styles were as varied as humans'. Even before they became mothers, some females just loved to touch and hold babies, but some were about as maternal as Paris Hilton. When they had babies of their own, some of them doted, and some were downright abusive. So, he began a systematic look at how the rhesus' hormones changed with time and experience.

Maestripieri compared the mothers' estrogen, progesterone, and prolactin levels and tracked them over time, but found no differences. He tried manipulating their endogenous opioids, the beta-endorphins that get us naturally high. Nothing. Next, he looked at the role of early experiences. Right after birth, he switched around some newborn monkeys, giving the babies of good mothers to bad mothers, and letting the good mothers raise the babies of abusive females. The children of aggressive mothers tended to be aggressive themselves -- even though they were raised by sweet mothers. The same held true for sociability; the babies of irritable, unfriendly mothers tended to react to others the same way, even though they grew up in a cordial clan. This showed that an individual's tendency to be sweet or mean may be inherited.

But when Maestripieri looked at the brain chemicals of baby monkeys, he found that the kind of mothering they got did matter -- a lot. Some of the babies who were regularly rejected by their mothers -- being pushed away when they tried to climb into her arms, for example -- had up to 20 percent less serotonin, a neurotransmitter that's a mood elevator. Low levels of serotonin are associated with depression, anxiety, and impulsive aggression in monkeys and humans. The more rejection a baby experienced, the less serotonin it produced, and these low levels continued into adulthood. Some of these low-serotonin monkeys went on to become bad mothers themselves.

While serotonin isn't a direct part the oxytocin/attachment system, the two brain chemicals are closely related. Serotonin stimulates the release of both oxytocin and vasopressin. Therefore, it's a good bet that monkeys and humans with low levels of serotonin don't experience as strong an oxytocin response. They may not bond as deeply; they may not be able to bond at all.

About half of the abused monkey babies, however, went on to become relatively good mothers. And they didn't have lowered serotonin levels. It's possible that they inherited more resilience to stress and more oxytocin-rich parasympathetic nervous systems from their loving mommas. This is reassuring to all of us who didn't get the kind of mothering we wish we had. We can overcome both nature and nurture to raise children who are even more secure and more loving than we are.

If, like me, you're fascinated about how nature and nurture made us the way we are -- and why we do or don't turn out like our parents, it's well worth searching out his research. Here are the studies I've covered:

Maestripieri, Dario. 2003. Similarities in Affiliation and Aggression Between Cross-Fostered Rhesus Macaque Females and Their Biological Mothers. Developmental Psychobiology 43(4):321-327.

Maestripieri, Dario. 2005. Early experience affects the intergenerational transmission of infant abuse in rhesus monkeys. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102:9726–9729.

Get Oxytocin Safely in Clinical Trials

In response to a recent comment, I took a new look at the database of clinical trials that are recruiting subjects for oxytocin studies, available at ClinicalTrials.gov. I see that Daniel Feifel of the University of California San Diego is recruiting subjects for two studies to test oxytocin on symptoms of schizophrenia.

And it looks like Evdokia Anagnostou of Eric Hollander's Mt. Sinai team is recruiting for a couple of studies of adults with ASD, although it's hard to tell if the database is current.

Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Mental Health is recruiting for a study of people without psychiatric diagnoses on "Identifying the Role of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in the Functioning of Neurocognitive Systems Involved in Mood Disorders."

We can expect more and more of these as #1 scientists strive to learn more and more about the neurochemical basis of emotion and #2 pharm companies look for new classes of drugs they can sell.

Partying Hearty on Oxytocin in India

 Oxytocin is the new party drug in India, according to this story from the Times of India.

I've seen previous news stories about police seizing illegal oxytocin or counterfeit versions, and wondered if this was a mistranslation and they meant oxycontin, the pain reliever. And evidently farmers often inject cows with oxytocin to increase milk production, an effect noted by Kristen Uvnas Moberg, the Swedish researcher who was the first to understand this hormone/neurochemical's powerful effects on our moods and ability to bond.

The Times explains that kids inject the oxytocin.

According to a pharmacy expert, the drug induces a numb state of mind. "After a period of intense activity and enjoyment where the addicts are numb to pain, effect of the drug wears off and the users drop, literally. It leaves the addicts’ nervous system in a mess and the users need time to recover," he said.

I dunno about this numb state of mind. They may, rather, feel very calm and connected to each other, similar to the way people who take ecstasy at raves say they feel. (It's been shown that this drug causes a release of oxytocin in the brain of mice.) Oxytocin certainly does reduce sensitivity to pain, and the "mess" side effects have been seen in people who take ecstasy frequently.

The authorities may be overstating the negative effects, as they sometimes do. Nevertheless, I do NOT advocate using oxytocin recreationally. First, because it acts in so many ways to regulate the body, messing with the natural system could have unforeseen and not pretty consequences. Second, it's dangerous to inject anything into your body if you don't have sterile equipment and know what you're doing -- especially if you can't be sure of what you're injecting.

How to Get Oxytocin Right NOW

The Mike & Juliet Show was mostly an attack on Liquid Trust. The manufacturer refuses to say how much oxytocin is in the product, but it won't get into your body - or anyone else's -- if you spray it on your clothes or even skin.

There are plenty of ways to experience a natural oxytocin release without buying anything. In my book (The Chemistry of Connection, April 2009) I explain the oxytocin response, why we don't all have a healthy one, and talk about ways of building it up.

But all of us do have a hypothalamus and all of us do release oxytocin; without it, we'd die. To get the social benefits, try one or more of the following. If you can, set aside at least 15 minutes to do this and nothing else:

• Cuddle
• Sing in a choir
• Hold a baby
• Stroke a dog or cat
• Perform a generous act
• Pray
• Make love
• Have an orgasm (alone or with someone else)