An Israeli researcher has found that the ‘love hormone’ also controls antisocial emotions.
A researcher at Israel’s University of Haifa has discovered that the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin has an effect over both pro-social and antisocial emotions.
Oxytocin is a hormone known to control positive feelings of love, trust and empathy, and is released naturally during childbirth and sex.
In a new study published in the Journal of Biological Psychiatry, Israeli researcher Dr Simone Shamay-Tsoory at the University of Haifa’s Department of Psychology has found that oxytocin has an impact on negative emotions such as envy and gloating.
"Oxytocin is a hormone that also acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain," Dr Shamay-Tsoory explained. "It’s related to love, trust and empathy."
"We wanted to see if it affects our tendency to feel envy and gloating," she said. "So we administered oxytocin intranasally to 60 male and female subjects to examine how it affected their feelings of envy or gloating towards other participants."
Dr Shamay-Tsoory administered a synthetic form of oxytocin to half the participants and a placebo to the other half. She then switched the roles and administered the hormone to the second half and the placebo to the first, all the while putting the participants through an experimental game.
"Each subject had to choose one door out of three doors," Dr Shamay-Tsoory said, explaining the experiment. "They would each get a financial prize after opening the door and see what prizes the other participants received."
The study found that participants who had been administered the synthetic oxytocin felt higher levels of envy when others won money than those who had not been given the hormone.
"There was a computerized questionnaire in which participants rated their level of envy on a scale of 1 to 7 and we found that the level of envy among those who received less money was higher if their level of oxytocin was higher," she said. "Those who received more money felt more like gloating if their rate of oxytocin was higher. So basically while there were individual differences we found that overall oxytocin not only increases pro-social behavior but also envy and gloating."
The study raises questions as to the viability of synthetic oxytocin as a medication.
"We used to think that oxytocin was only related to pro-social emotions," Dr Shamay-Tsoory said. "But then there were studies on rats showing that oxytocin can enhance aggressive behavior."
"Now this is the first study on humans, and our findings suggest that oxytocin has a more general effect on social emotions, not just positive and pro-social emotions," she said. "This means that if we are going to try use oxytocin we need to take into account that it has negative effects."