Love Potion 9: Study Challenges “Love Hormone” Oxytocin’s Reputation As the Key To Pair Bonding
New research from the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford Medicine is challenging the long-held belief that the receptor for oxytocin, known as the “love hormone,” is essential for forming social bonds. The study, published in the journal Neuron, found that prairie voles bred without oxytocin receptors showed similar monogamous mating, attachment, and parenting behaviors to regular voles, and even gave birth and produced milk albeit in smaller quantities.
Studies in the 1990s using drugs that prevent oxytocin from binding to its receptor found that voles were unable to pair bond, giving rise to the idea that the hormone is essential to forming such attachments. Oxytocin is likely to have a role in both birth and lactation, but one that is more nuanced than previously thought, Manoli said. Female voles without receptors proved perfectly capable of giving birth, on the same timeframe and in the same way as the regular animals, even though labor has been thought to rely on oxytocin.
“This overturns conventional wisdom about lactation and oxytocin that’s existed for a much longer time than the pair bonding association,” said Shah. “It’s a standard in medical textbooks that the milk letdown reflex is mediated by the hormone, and here we are saying, ‘Wait a second, there’s more to it than that.
“These behaviors are too important to survival to hinge on this single point of potential failure,” said Manoli. “There are likely other pathways or other genetic wiring to allow for that behavior. Oxytocin receptor signaling could be one part of that program, but it’s not the be-all end-all.”
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