October 24, 2013 • 23 mins
Tainted Love Hormone: There's a dark side to oxytocin. Tune into this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind for the latest research on the dark side of the love hormone.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind somehow stuff works
dot com. Hey, we're gonna stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. We've
talked a bit about trust on here for about hormones,
about oxytocin, because you know, we're always big into talking
(00:25):
about what are the what are the scientific reasons for
all these surface levels of interaction for all though the
ways that we we feel, the ways that we behave
like what's what's making us tick? And oxytocin often comes
up in terms of trust, in terms of love, in
terms of emotional connections. So it was probably a bit
(00:48):
too much for us to think, or for anyone to
to get the idea that this is just a purely
positive thing, that there's something in the human body and
our in all of our the machinery that under lies
who we are, that there's one substance that's just nothing
but feel good in a jar. It's not the platonic ideal.
And if anything, this, this idea that oxytocin could have
(01:10):
a dark side, is just more evidence of dud the
duality of things right, And we've talked about oxytocin really
in terms of cuddling and hugging. Um, that whole idea
that if you wrap someone in an embrace for twenty
seconds or more, that you're giving them just the right
amount of pressure that your body will actually begin to
(01:32):
produce oxytocin. Now, I want anybody like that idea, and
I think it's great. Totally in favor of twenty second
hugs all right, But between consending adults, we yes, we
will this sort of like hug pile up hug club thing.
I'm not behind by the way, um, but we will
revisit this idea later as we talk about the dark
(01:54):
side of oxytocin. So where do we get this, this
idea that's that oxytocin is the super feel good a drug.
The thing is, we can kind of we can kind
of lay this at one individual's feet for the most part.
One uh one one doctor love one love doctor uh
an individual who you've seen on TED talks up there
(02:15):
with his microphone preaching the word of oxytocin and making
a very compelling argument. As individuals who give TED talks,
at least the more recent ones, often do you totally
buy into it? And you're like, yes, the feel good hormone,
the mother hormone, the hug hormone, the kiss hormone. Let
me have some of that. Yeah, and we'll talk about
Dr Paul Zack ak the love doctor, in a moment.
(02:35):
But I wanted just to mention the oxytocin is an
extract from the human posterior pituitary gland, and it was
discovered in nineteen o nine when the British pharmacologists or
Henry H. Dale, found that it could contract the uterus
of a pregnant cat. And of course that's another way
in which oxytocin shows up right, not just in cuddling
(02:56):
or um, you know, acts of love making, but also experiments,
cat experimentation and basically mammalian birth right um. According to
Ed Young, though, we have taken oxytocin as as the
sort of panacea for all ills, and we'll talk more
about that with regards to Paul Zack. But I didn't
want to say that the hormone is found in everything
(03:17):
from octopuses to sheep, and it's evolutionary roots stretched back
a half a billion years, and for decades, animal studies
have shown the oxytocin is important for social interactions. So
for example, if you block the hormone UM, monogamous vowles
will actually become more promiscuous and use neglect their newborn
lambs if they don't have access to that oxytocin. So
(03:40):
you could see how it would be informing our ideas
of UM connection, bonding, love, and and even in the
whole sort of birth and death cycle that we have
these notions about how we go along here in society. Yeah,
all these social animal interactions that we in evitably have,
all of these additional emotional layers that we wrap up
(04:03):
in as humans. Uh. At the scene of each crime,
oxytocin so like that's the thread that runs through all
of them. So of course we end up focusing on that,
and then as it's reported and championed it uh, it
increasingly becomes seen as this magical feel good elixir that
it flows through us. You're right, because there are accounts
of being released when you tweet something UM and you dance. Yes,
(04:27):
you know, It's just it shows up everywhere. And I
think that is what some researchers will say is the
problem is that people are looking more at the results
and not necessarily looking at the chemical and why it
is produced. Um. So again, let's let's talk about Paul
Zack though, because he kind of is the guy that
you have to point to who at least brought this
idea of oxytocin as this utopian chemical to a lot
(04:52):
of people's imaginations. Yeah, he's an American neuro economist and
he even refers to himself as doctor Love. So he
really presses this idea that that that not only is
it at the root of all these uh uh, these
positive social interactions, but that it can or at least
has the potential to change the world, that it can
(05:13):
be used almost offensively for the social betterment of the
human race. Now, he actually even calls it the morality
chemical because of some of his studies that he did.
Many different variations on, by the way, but the basic
premises that there's something called the trust game, and this
is when a person player one, is given some money
(05:35):
and told to send a portion of it to the
second person who is player too. Now player two has
a one off choice to either accept or reject the proposal,
and if Player to rejects, then neither one of them
get any money whatsoever. But if player to accepts, the
money is split according to the proposal. So again, here's
this idea that you know, there's some sort of morality
(05:57):
in in um generosity at play here, and typically a
low offer less than a third of the player's initial
endowment UM is rejected as stingy, ensuring that both players
getting are getting nothing. And that's where that sort of
morality comes into, because even though someone is offering another
person in a certain amount of money, if you if
(06:19):
I offer you ten cents, you might be like, what,
in no way, that's not enough. I'm not even gonna
take it, and then neither one of us get anything.
So when Zach tested the blood of players who had
demonstrated trustworthy behavior, he found that their oxytocin levels had
increased in proportion to the monetary transfer. And he did
this again and again um, as I said, just with
(06:39):
different scenarios, getting more and more philanthropic. Right, So, sometimes
sometimes players would give to UM a third party and
they would begin to see these spikes again an oxytocin
and the act of their generosity. And so he's sitting
there making this case that perhaps just the presence of
(07:00):
oxytocin could be enough to change the way that we
operate in the world. Right, and as no surprise, as
though we're looking at some links yesterday, you can go
on Amazon and you can buy oxytocin. You can buy
there's one called liquid Trust that that doesn't sound creepy
at all. It's in a spray canister, um, so that
(07:21):
you can make people trust you supposedly. UM. I don't know.
I haven't tried the product, but my guess is that
it doesn't work. The reviews seem to think it didn't work.
Now I have it just being piped into the air
dex Here no evidence that anybody is getting any more
generous with their sandwiches. So one one of the things
that we're gonna get into the particulars of this. But
(07:42):
I think that the route here is that that it's
that that oxytocin ends up being presented as this, uh,
this positive hormone, as this emotional hormone, is this morality
hormone when it's in a sense it is. It is
a social hormone, and it is it definitely isn'tvolved in
different social interactions. But are all social interactions positive? No, not,
(08:05):
not in the animal world, not in the human world.
And even the emotional responses in the human world that
we see as positive. When you strip them away and
you start looking at how they work as an organism,
you see just how much human bs is involved there.
You know, you can easily make the make the the
the argument that this whole hormonal rush and the attachment
been in the bond between between parent and child. I mean,
(08:29):
that's just about the organism surviving just gets down to
the root genetic mission that in and of itself is
completely devoid of love and understanding. All right, we're gonna
get to the bottom of this of the much more
nuanced versioning understanding that we are having of oxytocin in
a moment. But let's take a quick break. All right,
(08:58):
we're back. Let's talk about C twoson and how actually
has been showing up in studies is taking on a
far different role um talking about envy and schaden freud. Yes,
now in they of course we've discussed in detail. We
did a whole episode about it during our exploration of
the Seven Deadly sin in the is is when you
(09:20):
you see something that you want, or you see something
in another person and you maybe you don't even want it,
but you just sort of detest that. It's there you
might even just want to destroy it. But but you
have this intense negative response to something in somebody else
or off somebody else, And then there's schaden freud. But
that's when something unfortunate happens to another person inside you
(09:43):
sort of celebrate when you see or hear about it, right, yes,
which is it's not a great emotion, right, but all
of this at some point or another have probably experienced it.
Who doesn't like to see their friends fail every now
and then, just just to feel a little better. But
it could be in front of me, right, Yes, yeah,
I think, and that's probably I bet, I bet that
if you had some sort of widespread study on this,
(10:05):
you'd probably see it's more in front of me than enemy, right, yeah,
because your enemy, you know, that's because it's I feel
like part of the schaden freud a situation is that
you feel good about it, but you also feel bad
about it, like you know, you're not supposed to feel it. Well,
you don't only feel schaden freud about you know, a
bitter enemy, uh, you know, falling in defeat. That's more
(10:27):
just you know, the pure victory of overcoming your adversaries. Well,
that might be a clue as to why oxytocin plays
a part in shane freud, because if you think about it,
as you said, oxytocin is really the social hormone. If
you feel closer to someone that you know, then perhaps
you're not going to dwell in that arena of emotions.
So I wanted to point out that Simone Chamai to
(10:49):
Sourcie at the University of Haifa and Israel showed that
as well as promoting trust and generosity, oxytocin can heighten
feelings of envy and shaden freud. This is in the
journal Biological Psychiatry. When volunteers played a gambling game, those
who inhaled the hormone gloated more when they beat other players.
(11:10):
They also reported more acute stubs of jealousy and when
the tables were turned. Okay, now that gets us into
more of this again social construct here, and you think
about how we treat one another and how we are
sometimes biased when we make decisions because of the relationships
(11:30):
we have with people. Yeah, I mean everywhere you go
in human culture, obviously they're all these divisions, their divisions
of race, their divisions of of economic status, of show
social status, of of your status in a working environment,
all these these barriers come into play, and in many
cases artificial barriers that are just purely social inform but
(11:51):
you end up with all these different packs or tribes.
And we've seen this again and again that even if
two people are in a room and they have something
in common is say, the same shut on or the
same color, they tend to just subconsciously feel more connected
to that person. So the link can be so tenuous,
and yet we make that connection Oh I have that
shirt or oh you like that band as well, Yeah,
(12:12):
because on some level we want to we want to
project our own feelings onto that person and believe that
they're like us. That's all. We have icebreakers. So I
know everyone hates icebreakers, but if if one stupid game
of ice breaking trust falls or passing notes around, if
that can prevent one office X murder, then I say
go for it absolutely. And actually, as an aside, since
(12:34):
we just did an episode on vulnerability, that's a good
example of when you show your vulnerability, you show yourself
and there's more of a commonality there. But Caroline, the
clerk of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, she found
that people under the hormones influence became more cooperative with
one another only if they have some information about their partner.
That when they were paired with an anonymous stranger, they
(12:55):
became less cooperative. Now that was some real insight, because again,
oxytocin has been touted as this this bonding agent. Yeah,
like something that's just breaking down barriers. You pump it
into a room and uh and two bitter enemies are
just gonna embrace in a hug. Not so, because our
social interactions are also about divisions. It's I mean from
(13:16):
a just an evolutionary standpoint. I mean, think to that
scene in two thousand and one, uh, Space Odyssey where
you know, it's tribes of monkeys beating each other up
with with bones and that social interaction, and and no
doubt there was there was a little oxytocin involved in
that situation. Not that that actually happened. I'm not I'm
not of the mind that that seemed involved actual apes
(13:38):
killing each other. Well, I think the problem too is
that people when they looked at Paul's acts work, and
he was a big proponent of oxytosin and basically saying like, oh, well,
they're there in the London riots. If only, you know,
people weren't high on their testos room and they were
high on oxytocin, that wouldn't have happened. People said, no,
that's that's a cultural thing that that went on. It
had to do with economics, that had to do with
(14:00):
um education. There were there's so many different factors involved there.
And Paul Za kept saying, well, no, I don't think so,
because because our results are coming from the chemicals which
are measurable in the blood, and that's far more accurate
than say, fuzzy images from a brain scan, we think
that there's more hard evidence. But he, you know, I
don't think that he or some of the researchers at
(14:21):
that time really took into account the cultural aspects. And
I wanted to mention that he's young. Kim of the
University of California and Santa Barbara found that in South Korea,
where it's usually a faux pas to sort of burden
your friends with any of your problems, he found that
people who were certain carriers of this gene um how
(14:44):
to to explain this, We've talked about this before. Actually,
there are some people who have an a variant of
this gene and some people have a G variant and
basically it helps doc the oxytocin. So you you know
the receptors. You're gonna have much more oxytocin flowing through
you if you have this G variant. Okay, So this
is where we get into the people who are genetically huggers. Us.
(15:05):
We're talking about this hug acts. People are hugging all
the time. They might be needing a fix because there
they really like that oxytocin. Well, what this researcher found
is that, um, the people who are the hug junkies,
or who should be the hug junkies, actually solace far
less than they're they're non caring variants, and that at
(15:26):
the end of the day, it's it's the social trait,
it's the social sensitivity, and it's not you know, this
idea that you're responding to oxytocin is not determined by
biology but by culture. And here's a good example of
people who are acting in a certain way even though
biologically you should say, ah, yeah, those are the people
who are going to seek solace most often. Now, of course,
(15:47):
mindset plays a huge role here as well, and we
look at the research from Jennifer Bart's from the Mount
Sinai School of Medicine, if you found several responses that
depend on a person's minds, that showed that socially secure
people remember mothers in a more positive light after inhaling oxytocin,
while anxious ones remember their mothers as less caring and
more distant. So in that brief example, you can see
(16:10):
how the oxytocin YES is having it's having effect on
the individual, but it kind of depends on the mindset,
the existing wiring or the existing plumbing when you when
you pump this stuff in, YES actually show the oxytocin
hinders hinders trust and cooperation among people with borderline personality disorder.
So again it cannot be at this reductionist like you
(16:30):
just give someone some oxytocin and they're going to cooperate.
You can't just get that bottle of liquid trust and
just start hosing people down thinking that it's going to
universally have this positive effect on the right because you
have the cultural aspect to it, and then you just
have the mindsets um So some people actually may act
in ways that are counter intuitive to the whole social
(16:51):
bonding situation, and that brings up this question of why
why would oxytocin act in those various ways, And much
of that is still a miss free but there are
a couple of theories. So back to Bart's now, she
would say that the key to understanding what the hormone
does is really in talking about its function rather how
and where it shows up. And there are a couple
(17:13):
of theories out there. Oxytocin could help reduce anxiety and fear,
or it could simply motivate people to seek out social connections,
which would account for a rise and trust and cooperation
in some people, but also explain why oxytocin sniffers gravitate
towards others resembling themselves, and why people who fear social
(17:34):
rejection are not necessarily better off with more of the hormone.
So if you have anxiety in someone and uh, they
get a dose of oxytocin and they they're they're fear
arousal is heightened, then that's just sort of playing to
what they're already experiencing right now and helping them to
what they think battle is. You know, these these uh threats,
(17:57):
We're gonna take one more quick break and when we
come back more on this exciting topic. So what is
this this all pointing towards towards pointies work The obvious
that oxytocin is not a magic bullet. It's not something
that you can put in a can spraying somebody's face
(18:19):
and it's going to fix whatever is ailing them. But
and as we're saying that it's there are plenty of
studies going on right now. I think what forty different
clinical studies are currently ongoing about oxytocin, and and they're
exploring it with a more nuanced understanding for the most
part of what oxytocin is. So we're hoping to to
get to get a better understanding of how it works
(18:42):
and how and how it is engaging in all these
these show social interactions and there's the possibility that we
will learn how to better treat certain conditions with oxytopes
right Like, a lot of these clinical trials are looking
at autism and schizophrenia because the idea is if you
if you give a child who is autistic a dose
(19:03):
of this, that perhaps he or she will heighten their
ability to connect to bond, which is one of the
things that when you look at the autism spectrum. There's
there's sometimes a lack of that um. But researchers are saying,
don't go online and get the spray. First of all,
the concentrations aren't going to be enough to to really
do anything. And second of all, if you look at
these other findings that say that it can unheighten um,
(19:27):
you know, this, this envy, this schiden freud um, these
other sort of antisocial aspects of it, were not certain
how that's going to play out with people who might
have autism or schizophrenia. So, you know, let the let
the research continue on that so that they can get
a better picture of it. Yeah, because it is a
(19:47):
large extent the each individual's wiring, each individual's plumbing is
a little different and sometimes dramatically different depending on what's
going on there neurologically. So spraying one person down with
oxytose and spring another one down potentially vastly different effects.
So yeah, and you know, and I say, do you
not try at home? And I do understand how in
(20:09):
one level sort of disappointing because of its associations with
all the sort of kitten and rainbows um existence, you know, childbirth,
breast milk production, cuddling, but you know, it's a chemical
and it's it's far more complex, and we, above everything,
we want science to give us these silver bullets they
(20:31):
want to We want science to say, here's the vaccine
for this, here is the treatment that fixes this, Here
is a is another way that we can address something
that is wrong with an individual or even with us
as a species. Well, yeah, I was gonna say, I
wasn't actually gonna bring this up, but you and I
have talked about this before. Ted. The conference has come
(20:52):
under fire sometimes because it it does deliver these big
ideas and sort of silver bullets, you know, solutions, and
some people have said that it can be sort of
reductionist in that way, and Paul Zacks Ted talk is
really great and it is really uplifting, but at the
end of the day, it's it's you know, humanity is
(21:13):
much messier than that. So there you have it. Oxytocin.
We've covered it before. Now we've covered a little more,
and at this time we've we've we've added a little
darkness to our discussions of it. So so take that
with you as you as you observe yourself either engaging
in a twenty second hug or feeling the seething envy
as you look at your friends in your Facebook feed.
(21:35):
You know what I'm going as for Halloween? What are
you going in? An aggressive oxytocin hugger. See doesn't that
totally recast your idea of hugging? Now? Yeah? Yeah, like
a like a junkie, like I just name a fix
and a fix and I am the everybody else who
gets the hugs and I don't. There was a reason
we hugged. There's a recent skit on Key and Peel
(21:58):
where it's where there's a baseball player that truly into
slapping other baseball players butts and uh and he ends
at the end of the other baseball players on the
team tell him, no, we just we don't want you
to slapper butts anymore. Um, you just do it way
too much and you're just way too into it and uh.
And at the end of the episode, he's like a
he's he's like a junkie with withdrawals, just asking you know,
(22:19):
for one more slap, to one more butt uh and
and and you know it's silly and goofy, but but really,
I mean a social interaction like slapping a teammates, but
there's invariably oxytocin involved there, and if one is a
type but slapper, then then the situation is very akin
to an addict. So so I think I'm gonna create
(22:40):
these sort of blow up arms that really create a
vice gript around people for they can't escape, and maybe
a little countdown clock so after twenty seconds they can escape, Yeah,
or you can just shout the countdown like right in
their years. If you I'm going to be the most
popular person at the party. Yeah, all right, So there
(23:00):
you have it, the darkness of oxytocin. We'll let us
know how this information incorporates in your understanding of your
own life or the lives of those around you. We're
always game to hear those, and hey, in future episodes,
we're gonna try to fit in more loosener mail that
we're kind of running fast and ragged at the moment,
or at least I am. So how do you find us?
How do you get in touch with us? How do
you find the podcast? You got to stuff to blow
(23:21):
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at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands
(23:45):
of other topics. Does It How Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind somehow stuff works
dot com. Hey, we're gonna stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. We've
talked a bit about trust on here for about hormones,
about oxytocin, because you know, we're always big into talking
(00:25):
about what are the what are the scientific reasons for
all these surface levels of interaction for all though the
ways that we we feel, the ways that we behave
like what's what's making us tick? And oxytocin often comes
up in terms of trust, in terms of love, in
terms of emotional connections. So it was probably a bit
(00:48):
too much for us to think, or for anyone to
to get the idea that this is just a purely
positive thing, that there's something in the human body and
our in all of our the machinery that under lies
who we are, that there's one substance that's just nothing
but feel good in a jar. It's not the platonic ideal.
And if anything, this, this idea that oxytocin could have
(01:10):
a dark side, is just more evidence of dud the
duality of things right, And we've talked about oxytocin really
in terms of cuddling and hugging. Um, that whole idea
that if you wrap someone in an embrace for twenty
seconds or more, that you're giving them just the right
amount of pressure that your body will actually begin to
(01:32):
produce oxytocin. Now, I want anybody like that idea, and
I think it's great. Totally in favor of twenty second
hugs all right, But between consending adults, we yes, we
will this sort of like hug pile up hug club thing.
I'm not behind by the way, um, but we will
revisit this idea later as we talk about the dark
(01:54):
side of oxytocin. So where do we get this, this
idea that's that oxytocin is the super feel good a drug.
The thing is, we can kind of we can kind
of lay this at one individual's feet for the most part.
One uh one one doctor love one love doctor uh
an individual who you've seen on TED talks up there
(02:15):
with his microphone preaching the word of oxytocin and making
a very compelling argument. As individuals who give TED talks,
at least the more recent ones, often do you totally
buy into it? And you're like, yes, the feel good hormone,
the mother hormone, the hug hormone, the kiss hormone. Let
me have some of that. Yeah, and we'll talk about
Dr Paul Zack ak the love doctor, in a moment.
(02:35):
But I wanted just to mention the oxytocin is an
extract from the human posterior pituitary gland, and it was
discovered in nineteen o nine when the British pharmacologists or
Henry H. Dale, found that it could contract the uterus
of a pregnant cat. And of course that's another way
in which oxytocin shows up right, not just in cuddling
(02:56):
or um, you know, acts of love making, but also experiments,
cat experimentation and basically mammalian birth right um. According to
Ed Young, though, we have taken oxytocin as as the
sort of panacea for all ills, and we'll talk more
about that with regards to Paul Zack. But I didn't
want to say that the hormone is found in everything
(03:17):
from octopuses to sheep, and it's evolutionary roots stretched back
a half a billion years, and for decades, animal studies
have shown the oxytocin is important for social interactions. So
for example, if you block the hormone UM, monogamous vowles
will actually become more promiscuous and use neglect their newborn
lambs if they don't have access to that oxytocin. So
(03:40):
you could see how it would be informing our ideas
of UM connection, bonding, love, and and even in the
whole sort of birth and death cycle that we have
these notions about how we go along here in society. Yeah,
all these social animal interactions that we in evitably have,
all of these additional emotional layers that we wrap up
(04:03):
in as humans. Uh. At the scene of each crime,
oxytocin so like that's the thread that runs through all
of them. So of course we end up focusing on that,
and then as it's reported and championed it uh, it
increasingly becomes seen as this magical feel good elixir that
it flows through us. You're right, because there are accounts
of being released when you tweet something UM and you dance. Yes,
(04:27):
you know, It's just it shows up everywhere. And I
think that is what some researchers will say is the
problem is that people are looking more at the results
and not necessarily looking at the chemical and why it
is produced. Um. So again, let's let's talk about Paul
Zack though, because he kind of is the guy that
you have to point to who at least brought this
idea of oxytocin as this utopian chemical to a lot
(04:52):
of people's imaginations. Yeah, he's an American neuro economist and
he even refers to himself as doctor Love. So he
really presses this idea that that that not only is
it at the root of all these uh uh, these
positive social interactions, but that it can or at least
has the potential to change the world, that it can
(05:13):
be used almost offensively for the social betterment of the
human race. Now, he actually even calls it the morality
chemical because of some of his studies that he did.
Many different variations on, by the way, but the basic
premises that there's something called the trust game, and this
is when a person player one, is given some money
(05:35):
and told to send a portion of it to the
second person who is player too. Now player two has
a one off choice to either accept or reject the proposal,
and if Player to rejects, then neither one of them
get any money whatsoever. But if player to accepts, the
money is split according to the proposal. So again, here's
this idea that you know, there's some sort of morality
(05:57):
in in um generosity at play here, and typically a
low offer less than a third of the player's initial
endowment UM is rejected as stingy, ensuring that both players
getting are getting nothing. And that's where that sort of
morality comes into, because even though someone is offering another
person in a certain amount of money, if you if
(06:19):
I offer you ten cents, you might be like, what,
in no way, that's not enough. I'm not even gonna
take it, and then neither one of us get anything.
So when Zach tested the blood of players who had
demonstrated trustworthy behavior, he found that their oxytocin levels had
increased in proportion to the monetary transfer. And he did
this again and again um, as I said, just with
(06:39):
different scenarios, getting more and more philanthropic. Right, So, sometimes
sometimes players would give to UM a third party and
they would begin to see these spikes again an oxytocin
and the act of their generosity. And so he's sitting
there making this case that perhaps just the presence of
(07:00):
oxytocin could be enough to change the way that we
operate in the world. Right, and as no surprise, as
though we're looking at some links yesterday, you can go
on Amazon and you can buy oxytocin. You can buy
there's one called liquid Trust that that doesn't sound creepy
at all. It's in a spray canister, um, so that
(07:21):
you can make people trust you supposedly. UM. I don't know.
I haven't tried the product, but my guess is that
it doesn't work. The reviews seem to think it didn't work.
Now I have it just being piped into the air
dex Here no evidence that anybody is getting any more
generous with their sandwiches. So one one of the things
that we're gonna get into the particulars of this. But
(07:42):
I think that the route here is that that it's
that that oxytocin ends up being presented as this, uh,
this positive hormone, as this emotional hormone, is this morality
hormone when it's in a sense it is. It is
a social hormone, and it is it definitely isn'tvolved in
different social interactions. But are all social interactions positive? No, not,
(08:05):
not in the animal world, not in the human world.
And even the emotional responses in the human world that
we see as positive. When you strip them away and
you start looking at how they work as an organism,
you see just how much human bs is involved there.
You know, you can easily make the make the the
the argument that this whole hormonal rush and the attachment
been in the bond between between parent and child. I mean,
(08:29):
that's just about the organism surviving just gets down to
the root genetic mission that in and of itself is
completely devoid of love and understanding. All right, we're gonna
get to the bottom of this of the much more
nuanced versioning understanding that we are having of oxytocin in
a moment. But let's take a quick break. All right,
(08:58):
we're back. Let's talk about C twoson and how actually
has been showing up in studies is taking on a
far different role um talking about envy and schaden freud. Yes,
now in they of course we've discussed in detail. We
did a whole episode about it during our exploration of
the Seven Deadly sin in the is is when you
(09:20):
you see something that you want, or you see something
in another person and you maybe you don't even want it,
but you just sort of detest that. It's there you
might even just want to destroy it. But but you
have this intense negative response to something in somebody else
or off somebody else, And then there's schaden freud. But
that's when something unfortunate happens to another person inside you
(09:43):
sort of celebrate when you see or hear about it, right, yes,
which is it's not a great emotion, right, but all
of this at some point or another have probably experienced it.
Who doesn't like to see their friends fail every now
and then, just just to feel a little better. But
it could be in front of me, right, Yes, yeah,
I think, and that's probably I bet, I bet that
if you had some sort of widespread study on this,
(10:05):
you'd probably see it's more in front of me than enemy, right, yeah,
because your enemy, you know, that's because it's I feel
like part of the schaden freud a situation is that
you feel good about it, but you also feel bad
about it, like you know, you're not supposed to feel it. Well,
you don't only feel schaden freud about you know, a
bitter enemy, uh, you know, falling in defeat. That's more
(10:27):
just you know, the pure victory of overcoming your adversaries. Well,
that might be a clue as to why oxytocin plays
a part in shane freud, because if you think about it,
as you said, oxytocin is really the social hormone. If
you feel closer to someone that you know, then perhaps
you're not going to dwell in that arena of emotions.
So I wanted to point out that Simone Chamai to
(10:49):
Sourcie at the University of Haifa and Israel showed that
as well as promoting trust and generosity, oxytocin can heighten
feelings of envy and shaden freud. This is in the
journal Biological Psychiatry. When volunteers played a gambling game, those
who inhaled the hormone gloated more when they beat other players.
(11:10):
They also reported more acute stubs of jealousy and when
the tables were turned. Okay, now that gets us into
more of this again social construct here, and you think
about how we treat one another and how we are
sometimes biased when we make decisions because of the relationships
(11:30):
we have with people. Yeah, I mean everywhere you go
in human culture, obviously they're all these divisions, their divisions
of race, their divisions of of economic status, of show
social status, of of your status in a working environment,
all these these barriers come into play, and in many
cases artificial barriers that are just purely social inform but
(11:51):
you end up with all these different packs or tribes.
And we've seen this again and again that even if
two people are in a room and they have something
in common is say, the same shut on or the
same color, they tend to just subconsciously feel more connected
to that person. So the link can be so tenuous,
and yet we make that connection Oh I have that
shirt or oh you like that band as well, Yeah,
(12:12):
because on some level we want to we want to
project our own feelings onto that person and believe that
they're like us. That's all. We have icebreakers. So I
know everyone hates icebreakers, but if if one stupid game
of ice breaking trust falls or passing notes around, if
that can prevent one office X murder, then I say
go for it absolutely. And actually, as an aside, since
(12:34):
we just did an episode on vulnerability, that's a good
example of when you show your vulnerability, you show yourself
and there's more of a commonality there. But Caroline, the
clerk of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, she found
that people under the hormones influence became more cooperative with
one another only if they have some information about their partner.
That when they were paired with an anonymous stranger, they
(12:55):
became less cooperative. Now that was some real insight, because again,
oxytocin has been touted as this this bonding agent. Yeah,
like something that's just breaking down barriers. You pump it
into a room and uh and two bitter enemies are
just gonna embrace in a hug. Not so, because our
social interactions are also about divisions. It's I mean from
(13:16):
a just an evolutionary standpoint. I mean, think to that
scene in two thousand and one, uh, Space Odyssey where
you know, it's tribes of monkeys beating each other up
with with bones and that social interaction, and and no
doubt there was there was a little oxytocin involved in
that situation. Not that that actually happened. I'm not I'm
not of the mind that that seemed involved actual apes
(13:38):
killing each other. Well, I think the problem too is
that people when they looked at Paul's acts work, and
he was a big proponent of oxytosin and basically saying like, oh, well,
they're there in the London riots. If only, you know,
people weren't high on their testos room and they were
high on oxytocin, that wouldn't have happened. People said, no,
that's that's a cultural thing that that went on. It
had to do with economics, that had to do with
(14:00):
um education. There were there's so many different factors involved there.
And Paul Za kept saying, well, no, I don't think so,
because because our results are coming from the chemicals which
are measurable in the blood, and that's far more accurate
than say, fuzzy images from a brain scan, we think
that there's more hard evidence. But he, you know, I
don't think that he or some of the researchers at
(14:21):
that time really took into account the cultural aspects. And
I wanted to mention that he's young. Kim of the
University of California and Santa Barbara found that in South Korea,
where it's usually a faux pas to sort of burden
your friends with any of your problems, he found that
people who were certain carriers of this gene um how
(14:44):
to to explain this, We've talked about this before. Actually,
there are some people who have an a variant of
this gene and some people have a G variant and
basically it helps doc the oxytocin. So you you know
the receptors. You're gonna have much more oxytocin flowing through
you if you have this G variant. Okay, So this
is where we get into the people who are genetically huggers. Us.
(15:05):
We're talking about this hug acts. People are hugging all
the time. They might be needing a fix because there
they really like that oxytocin. Well, what this researcher found
is that, um, the people who are the hug junkies,
or who should be the hug junkies, actually solace far
less than they're they're non caring variants, and that at
(15:26):
the end of the day, it's it's the social trait,
it's the social sensitivity, and it's not you know, this
idea that you're responding to oxytocin is not determined by
biology but by culture. And here's a good example of
people who are acting in a certain way even though
biologically you should say, ah, yeah, those are the people
who are going to seek solace most often. Now, of course,
(15:47):
mindset plays a huge role here as well, and we
look at the research from Jennifer Bart's from the Mount
Sinai School of Medicine, if you found several responses that
depend on a person's minds, that showed that socially secure
people remember mothers in a more positive light after inhaling oxytocin,
while anxious ones remember their mothers as less caring and
more distant. So in that brief example, you can see
(16:10):
how the oxytocin YES is having it's having effect on
the individual, but it kind of depends on the mindset,
the existing wiring or the existing plumbing when you when
you pump this stuff in, YES actually show the oxytocin
hinders hinders trust and cooperation among people with borderline personality disorder.
So again it cannot be at this reductionist like you
(16:30):
just give someone some oxytocin and they're going to cooperate.
You can't just get that bottle of liquid trust and
just start hosing people down thinking that it's going to
universally have this positive effect on the right because you
have the cultural aspect to it, and then you just
have the mindsets um So some people actually may act
in ways that are counter intuitive to the whole social
(16:51):
bonding situation, and that brings up this question of why
why would oxytocin act in those various ways, And much
of that is still a miss free but there are
a couple of theories. So back to Bart's now, she
would say that the key to understanding what the hormone
does is really in talking about its function rather how
and where it shows up. And there are a couple
(17:13):
of theories out there. Oxytocin could help reduce anxiety and fear,
or it could simply motivate people to seek out social connections,
which would account for a rise and trust and cooperation
in some people, but also explain why oxytocin sniffers gravitate
towards others resembling themselves, and why people who fear social
(17:34):
rejection are not necessarily better off with more of the hormone.
So if you have anxiety in someone and uh, they
get a dose of oxytocin and they they're they're fear
arousal is heightened, then that's just sort of playing to
what they're already experiencing right now and helping them to
what they think battle is. You know, these these uh threats,
(17:57):
We're gonna take one more quick break and when we
come back more on this exciting topic. So what is
this this all pointing towards towards pointies work The obvious
that oxytocin is not a magic bullet. It's not something
that you can put in a can spraying somebody's face
(18:19):
and it's going to fix whatever is ailing them. But
and as we're saying that it's there are plenty of
studies going on right now. I think what forty different
clinical studies are currently ongoing about oxytocin, and and they're
exploring it with a more nuanced understanding for the most
part of what oxytocin is. So we're hoping to to
get to get a better understanding of how it works
(18:42):
and how and how it is engaging in all these
these show social interactions and there's the possibility that we
will learn how to better treat certain conditions with oxytopes
right Like, a lot of these clinical trials are looking
at autism and schizophrenia because the idea is if you
if you give a child who is autistic a dose
(19:03):
of this, that perhaps he or she will heighten their
ability to connect to bond, which is one of the
things that when you look at the autism spectrum. There's
there's sometimes a lack of that um. But researchers are saying,
don't go online and get the spray. First of all,
the concentrations aren't going to be enough to to really
do anything. And second of all, if you look at
these other findings that say that it can unheighten um,
(19:27):
you know, this, this envy, this schiden freud um, these
other sort of antisocial aspects of it, were not certain
how that's going to play out with people who might
have autism or schizophrenia. So, you know, let the let
the research continue on that so that they can get
a better picture of it. Yeah, because it is a
(19:47):
large extent the each individual's wiring, each individual's plumbing is
a little different and sometimes dramatically different depending on what's
going on there neurologically. So spraying one person down with
oxytose and spring another one down potentially vastly different effects.
So yeah, and you know, and I say, do you
not try at home? And I do understand how in
(20:09):
one level sort of disappointing because of its associations with
all the sort of kitten and rainbows um existence, you know, childbirth,
breast milk production, cuddling, but you know, it's a chemical
and it's it's far more complex, and we, above everything,
we want science to give us these silver bullets they
(20:31):
want to We want science to say, here's the vaccine
for this, here is the treatment that fixes this, Here
is a is another way that we can address something
that is wrong with an individual or even with us
as a species. Well, yeah, I was gonna say, I
wasn't actually gonna bring this up, but you and I
have talked about this before. Ted. The conference has come
(20:52):
under fire sometimes because it it does deliver these big
ideas and sort of silver bullets, you know, solutions, and
some people have said that it can be sort of
reductionist in that way, and Paul Zacks Ted talk is
really great and it is really uplifting, but at the
end of the day, it's it's you know, humanity is
(21:13):
much messier than that. So there you have it. Oxytocin.
We've covered it before. Now we've covered a little more,
and at this time we've we've we've added a little
darkness to our discussions of it. So so take that
with you as you as you observe yourself either engaging
in a twenty second hug or feeling the seething envy
as you look at your friends in your Facebook feed.
(21:35):
You know what I'm going as for Halloween? What are
you going in? An aggressive oxytocin hugger. See doesn't that
totally recast your idea of hugging? Now? Yeah? Yeah, like
a like a junkie, like I just name a fix
and a fix and I am the everybody else who
gets the hugs and I don't. There was a reason
we hugged. There's a recent skit on Key and Peel
(21:58):
where it's where there's a baseball player that truly into
slapping other baseball players butts and uh and he ends
at the end of the other baseball players on the
team tell him, no, we just we don't want you
to slapper butts anymore. Um, you just do it way
too much and you're just way too into it and uh.
And at the end of the episode, he's like a
he's he's like a junkie with withdrawals, just asking you know,
(22:19):
for one more slap, to one more butt uh and
and and you know it's silly and goofy, but but really,
I mean a social interaction like slapping a teammates, but
there's invariably oxytocin involved there, and if one is a
type but slapper, then then the situation is very akin
to an addict. So so I think I'm gonna create
(22:40):
these sort of blow up arms that really create a
vice gript around people for they can't escape, and maybe
a little countdown clock so after twenty seconds they can escape, Yeah,
or you can just shout the countdown like right in
their years. If you I'm going to be the most
popular person at the party. Yeah, all right, So there
(23:00):
you have it, the darkness of oxytocin. We'll let us
know how this information incorporates in your understanding of your
own life or the lives of those around you. We're
always game to hear those, and hey, in future episodes,
we're gonna try to fit in more loosener mail that
we're kind of running fast and ragged at the moment,
or at least I am. So how do you find us?
How do you get in touch with us? How do
you find the podcast? You got to stuff to blow
(23:21):
your mind? Dot com? That's what you do, because that's
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(23:45):
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