Hug the Monkey

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.

Neglect as Damaging for Kids as Abuse

A new study shows that children who are neglected in the first two years of life are much more likely to be aggressive by the time they're four, according to this article in Science Daily.

Neglect is twice as prevalent as abuse in child maltreatment cases reported in the United States.

The lack of attention devoted to the problem of neglect -- the so-called 'neglect of neglect' -- is a long-standing concern in the child welfare field," said study co-author Jon Hussey, research assistant professor of maternal and child health in the UNC School of Public Health and a fellow at the Carolina Population Center. "Despite being more common than abuse, we know relatively little about the impact of neglect on children."

The results of the study are not surprising, but it is good ammunition for educators and people who work with new mothers and young children. As Allan Schore, the guru of attachment neuroscience, points out, a human infant left alone in the wild would quickly die. Babies that went into high alert and screamed their heads off when dropped or left alone were more likely to survive, so this recognition is part of the baby's automatic reactions at birth.

Babies who are left alone too much often get stuck in the fight-or-flight response; as they get older, and are capable of hitting or kicking to defend themselves, it's natural that they react to perceived threats with aggression.

The Vasopressin Takeover

Evan of Two Puppies Enter, One Puppy Leaves posted a link to a BBC science podcast in which scientists explain that three years after the birth of a child, oxytocin receptors in the parents' brains wane, while vasopressin becomes more prevalent.

I don't have time to listen to the podcast or follow up on the journal articles right now, but according to his blog post, Lucy Vincent (neurobiologist at the French Scientific Research Center) and Dave Perrett (Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews) said that

after 12-18 months the infant becomes significantly less vulnerable (able to stand and perhaps throw off a bird or small animal attacking it), at which point only one parent would be necessary. And at that point, the oxytocin effect more or less ceases, yielding to increased vasopressin receptor activity- essentially a biochemical foundation for why people tend to “fall out of love” after a few years

I think maybe they were talking about the male brain, not the female's.

Motherhood and fatherhood both change a person's brain; changes in the mother's brain have been shown to be permanent in rats. However, oxytocin receptors, which become profuse during pregnancy, may disappear and/or become less sensitive.

Vasopressin, which is very closely related to oxytocin, may be more involved in male attachment, and lead to the expression of this attachment in protective behaviors. If you have the time, his post and the podcast are probably worth checking out.

Sexual Monogamy Probably Doesn't Exist

The prairie voles are always touted as paragons of monogamy, ever since Sue Carter at the University of Illinois made headlines by "turning off" pair bonds in females by blocking the effects of oxytocin.

The idea is that in the brains of monogamous animals, including humans, oxytocin and dopamine interact in the brain's reward centers to create what's sometimes described as an addiction to the mate.

But Carter and her early collaborator, Larry Young of Emory University, constantly reiterate that the voles are socially monogamous. In other words, they live in stable families consisting of a mating pair -- that stays mated for life -- and virgin offspring. This doesn't stop them from extra-pair copulation.

I went to a seminar last year in which Young said that a very high percentage of male prairie voles never become monogamous.

Now, new research published in Nature showed that the prairie voles cheat a lot. Lead researcher Alexander Ophir quantified these extra-pair couplings, but found that it didn't have any effect on the vole couples' ability to successfully breed and raise offspring.

The Power of Courtship

Some private comments to me from a reader prompted me to think more about how culture influences our perceptions about what's the “normal” progression of love relationships.

He's 19 and says he's never been in a relationship, and therefore doesn't understand what love is. He added that this could be because of his cultural background.

This totally makes sense to me. Love, in the sense of the oxytocin-based bond, is deeply physical as well as emotional. By that, I don't mean necessarily sex or sensuality, but rather that the oxytocin response, like other emotional responses, is a full-body feeling. I think my friend, whom I will call T., may be in a highly desirable though rare state.

I've written before about the difference between romantic love and committed, oxytocin-based love. American culture focuses on romantic love, which is based on excitement and novelty. Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love, thinks that lust, romance and love are handled by different systems in the brain, so they're not even that related. Americans strive for that early romantic stage and, when it inevitably ends, think they've fallen out of love.

So, T. seems to have managed to avoid those false expectations of romance that our culture imposes. He's an emotional virgin. That means, when he does fall in love – and I believe he will, when he's ready – he'll be able to experience it in all its depth and glory and variety, as it moves from romance to committed love.

T. also said that different groups of friends encourage him to do different things. I would guess that his westernized friends encourage him to date a lot of women, and have sex with him if he can. It's important to be experienced, they tell him. Friends from his traditional culture advise him to wait until he's found someone he wants to marry.

The more I learn about the oxytocin bond, the more respect I have for traditional behavior. Let me invoke once again the prairie voles.

These monogamous rodents provided the first clues to how oxytocin creates social bonds. Thomas Insel, Larry Young and Sue Carter all did experiments with blocking the effects of oxytocin or injecting it into the brains of voles. And they found that, especially in females, blocking oxytocin blocked the ability to bond.

But bonding doesn't happen automatically for the prairie voles. Females don't go into estrus and then seek out or accept a male. Here's how they mate: Females remain with their family groups, while newly mature males leave the nest. When a male finds a virgin female, he remains close by. After approximately three days of peaceful proximity, the female goes into estrus and they mate, then go off to establish their own nest.

The female needs time to become comfortable with the male before she's receptive. Once they've mated, they're mated for life. (Although both may engage in extra-pair copulation.)

Does that sound like traditional human courtship or what?

In fact, it's clear that human mates are able to bond deeply without going through the romantic phase at all.

My advice to T. would be: It's natural to wonder about love, to crave and desire it. Don't try to force it by doing anything that doesn't feel right or comfortable to you. Instead, wait until you meet someone who is like you. And don't worry about understanding love. When it begins for you, you'll know it.

See Also, Romance versus Love and Get Over Romance, Already.

Photo from Just Clicked.

Baby Love Training

This is one of the more unusual programs I've ever seen.  Aschool in Seattle is teaching kids empathy by bringing up baby into the classroom.  it's an anti-bullying program. The theory is even being around the baby, whether or not it's your own or you even know, it stimulates the release of oxytocin.  And oxytocin increases empathy, as many studies have now shown. So, if kids have more empathy, they'll be less likely to bully, the theory goes.

So, the idea is, these kids are exposed regularly to baby they release oxytocin feel kinder to each other and over time, this becomes a natural and automatic state of being.

Follow the links in this blog post to find out more about the program.

Maybe I'm a little over sensitive to the germ issue right now, thanks to everybody I know having been sick this winter, but I'm a little surprised they can find someone willing to bring a baby into their classroom.

Quiz: Is It True Love?

I write a lot about the difference between romantic love -- which never lasts -- and what I call "true love." To me, true love is the deep, emotional and physical bond that's based on oxytocin.

I wrote a quiz that's not super-scientific, so don't go making any important decisions based on it. But it should give you some insight into the basis of your relationship.

You can find it here: Is It True Love?

For Orphans, There's a Critical Period for Nurturing

In the United States and some other countries, there's awareness that babies in orphanages need to have a primary caregiver -- someone they can bond with. If they don't, they will likely grow up with many psychological and cognitive problems. Babies need loving touch for proper brain development and to develop the oxytocin response that will teach them to bond with others.

The foster care system in the United States is far from perfect -- far, far from perfect. But many nations still have a policy of caring for orphans in institutions, rather than in foster homes. It's partly a question of resources; in an institution, one person can care for many more children.

Researchers from the University of Maryland, led by Nathan Fox, just published the results of a years-long study in Romania in which they compared the development of children in orphanages to those in foster homes.

In one orphanage in the study, the ration of caregiver to children was 1 to 22. If each worker worked an eight-hour shift, she could spend less than 22 minutes a shift on each child. Think about a baby who is changed, fed and touched for no more than one hour each day.

The researchers moved half of the 156 children in the study into foster homes and left the rest in institutions. They could do this ethically because there was no foster care system in Romania at this time -- they had to set one up.

According to the article in Science Daily,

The main findings from the study confirmed earlier results that "children reared in institutions showed greatly diminished intellectual performance relative to children reared in their families of origin." Further, children who were randomly assigned to foster care experienced "significant gains in cognitive function."

They didn't look at attachment, but certainly, the longer the children stayed in the institution, the more attachment problems they had. These are expressed in what we now call reactive attachment disorder, oppositional defiance disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.  (Institutionalized babies develop PTSD because their bodies instinctively "know" that if they're separated from their mothers, they will die.)

The researchers also found that 24 months was the critical age for children to benefit from placement into a foster home.

But, the sooner the better! And of course, adoption into a permanent home is the best outcome.

Clingy Babies Make Confident Adults

To develop a healthy oxytocin response, a person needs to have a warm, secure and loving environment as a baby. Now, some people worry that coddling a young child will make him or her shy, clingy or needy.

Well, a child is needy; she needs everything from her parents. She has no way of getting anything she needs without them.

Children who grow up with a lot of love have a less reactive fear response and they're more open to connecting with other people. It's a recipe for healthy adulthood.

A study from the University of Haifa confirms this. Irit Yanir found that young adults who regularly spent time with their parents and felt comfortable sharing feelings with them were actually better able to cope with the responsibilities of adulthood:

While a close relationship is often viewed as a sign of dependence, the research results show that those with close relationships with their parents were more financially self-sufficient, more independent in their day-to-day lives, professionally stable, felt more mature and were more likely to be involved in a stable intimate relationship.

Gray and White Matters

There seems to be a flood of brain research lately that helps illuminate how the brain responds to social stimuli.

An intriguing new area is looking at two kinds of tissue in the brain: white matter and gray matter.  We usually think of gray matter as the stuff we use for cognition; more grey matter tends to equal a higher IQ, for example. White matter, on the other hand, is the connective nerve tissue thought to be used for "wiring together" different parts of the brain.

Of course, it's not that simple.  Too much gray matter in some regions has been linked to trauma.

Two studies released today looked at the relationship between volume of white or gray matter and behavior.

First, a team led by Manzar Ashtari of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania looked at the brains of autistic kids. They found more gray matter than normal in parts of the brain dealing with social interactions. They think this could be related to abnormal function of the mirror neuron system.

Mirror neurons are thought to be special kinds of nerve cells that fire when we watch others. It's still speculative in humans, but they've found that monkeys have what they call mirror neuron regions that fire when the monkey watches a researcher pick up a cup. This might be related to empathy, the ability to literally put oneself in another's place. See Mirror Neurons, Oxytocin and Autism for more.

According to the Science Daily story,

"In the normal brain, larger amounts of gray matter are associated with higher IQs," Dr. Ashtari said. "But in the autistic brain, increased gray matter does not correspond to IQ, because this gray matter is not functioning properly."The autistic children also evidenced a significant decrease of gray matter in the right amygdala region that correlated with severity of social impairment. Children with lower gray matter volumes in this area of the brain had lower scores on reciprocity and social interaction measures.

Another study by James Cantor of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto  found significantly less white matter in the brains of pedophiles than in the brains of non-sexual offenders. The article says,

The study, published in the Journal of Psychiatry Research, challenges the commonly held belief that pedophilia is brought on by childhood trauma or abuse. This finding is the strongest evidence yet that pedophilia is instead the result of a problem in brain development.

I don't understand why they draw this conclusion. Plenty of studies have shown abnormalities in brain development in children who've been neglected, abused or traumatized. In fact, Victor Carrion of Stanford has found more gray matter in the prefrontal cortexes of the brains of children with PTSD. He's also found decreased total volume in the PFCs of adults and children with PTSD.

He recently told me that it's difficult to identify exactly what these differences mean when it comes to brain function and behavior. He said, "It seems like in some regions, there's a problem if you have more volume ...  in others, it's problematic if you don't have enough."

It seems to me that Cantor's study provides further evidence for two things: that early trauma affects brain development, and that this abnormal brain development leads to abnormal behavior later.

I've contacted the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to more information on this statement. I'll post if and when they get back to me.