Chances are you’ve heard of oxytocin before.
Mainly because of stories like this:
"Oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle chemical"
"Hugging releases oxytocin"
"Here's your prescription from Dr. Love: Eight hugs a day"
But... none of these things are exactly true.
In our quest to simplify things, the story of oxytocin has been muddled and mixed up
so much, it's full of misconceptions.
And it's gotten so out of hand, you can even buy oxytocin spray for an unsubstantiated
spritz of love and trust.
So it you're wondering:
📍 how did we get to this point and what does oxytocin actually do?
You're in the right place.
We're going to get to the bottom of the science of oxytocin.
Because everything you're heard about oxytocin... is probably wrong.
Part of this video is sponsored by Wondrium.
Get your free trial at wondrium.com/braincraft
This is probably what you've heard about oxytocin.
That it is a cuddle chemical or a hug hormone, and that if you were to hug your partner,
that is one surefire way to release oxytocin.
And, uh, that might not necessarily be true.
Okay so Dan is an oxytocin researcher
My name is Dan Quintana and I'm a senior researcher at the university of Oslo in the department
of psychology.
As an expert,
I've been researching oxytocin now for over a decade.
Dan is also an internet oxytocin myth buster.
And this is the most persistent myth: that you can quickly boost your oxytocin levels
by scratching your dog, hugging a pillow or even a goat, and you'll feel good!
So to understand why this is not necessarily the case, we have to go back to basics with
oxytocin.
it's really interesting in that it operates both as a hormone and a neurotransmitter.
So a neurotransmitter typically communicates from cell to cell within the brain, whereas
a hormone is produced in one area of the body and it is released into the bloodstream typically,
and it acts at in different parts of the body.
Oxytocin is special because it does both.
Oxytocin was discovered in the early 1900s, where researchers figured out it plays an
important role in childbirth by contracting the uterus and then in breastfeeding.
But that's actually not exactly where the hug hormone idea came from.
It all started with... goats.
In the 1970s, researchers at the time suspected that oxytocin...
might also have a social aspect.
That oxytocin might also contribute to this bond between the mother goat and the child.
But why... goats?
Do you think that goats are a bit random?
The bond between, um, mother and child and goats is a lot when it comes to odor.
They are very good at identifying, like even within a large herd of goats, they can identify,
via smell who the offspring are.
So since it was discovered that oxytocin contributed to the smelly doe/kid goat bond, researchers
started to look at the social side of oxytocin in animals and humans.
Which led to one 1988 study in rats.
Which was looking at this role of oxytocin within touch.
And this study found that one type of touch seemed to release oxytocin in rats.
But it wasn't a hug, or a cuddle... it was... a pinch.
A nice pinch.
When we actually pinch rats experimentally, done in a nice way.
At least this seems to, release oxytocin and then people sort of took this and ran with
it and were going, oh wow, this is, this is what we need to do.
And somehow pinching turned into cuddling and turned into hugging.
How this happened is hard to say.
But I did find this reference to oxytocin and hugging in a 1994 magazine article, which
referenced a book, which referenced a bunch of late 80s and early 90s psychology textbooks
I don't have access to, in which, somewhere, a pinch became a cuddle.
And then specifically:
a hug for seven seconds or for five seconds, for some determinate amount of time.
I think this whole cuddle thing comes down to the fact that we, we make this link between
the maternal aspects of oxytocin between breastfeeding, between childbirth and these animal studies
linking how mother and child bond,
The story is actually quite complicated in that it might release oxytocin, but the levels
might be so small that it doesn't really make much of a difference there.
And the story *is* quite complicated.
There are a fair few studies on hugging and oxytocin, even in people who are hugging their
pets, but the way oxytocin is measured can't always tell us much.
typically in that kind of research, what we're doing is we are measuring levels of oxytocin
either in saliva or in blood.
But what's important to remember is that this release of oxytocin into the blood can often
be independent for oxytocin release in the brain.
So any effects that we're seeing in the blood could only just be a physical reaction to
being touched.
It may not necessarily have any effects on our brain physiology or on our thoughts and
feelings.
So we can't really say, well, it's affecting our behavior or it's affecting our brain.
Just to be clear – I’m pro-hug and please don’t stop hugging your dog – but the
evidence is mixed on the levels of oxytocin in people after the hug.
Often it rises, sometimes it falls, but that may not matter.
We might not even notice the change in oxytocin in our brains or bodies.
Within our experiments, we typically ask our participants, my lab and other labs typically
ask our participants, do you think you got the oxytocin or you got a placebo spray?
And people cannot guess beyond chance.
There is no feeling that you get with oxytocin.
I think it's interesting that people are trying to sell oxytocin online in an effort to go
this, this is a hormone which is gonna make you feel great.
I've seen people have thrown oxytocin parties where they either buy oxytocin online, which
I would not recommend.
Or they go around hugging each other, which is cool.
I think, you know, everyone can do with a hug, whether releases oxytocin's a different
story, but they have these oxytocin parties in, in an effort to increase their mood.
But oxytocin does not operate like that.
It is not like, you know, if you were to give someone a typical dose of ecstasy, you know,
you've got ecstasy, but if you were to give someone a typical dose of oxytocin, you cannot
guess beyond chance.
It doesn't give you a feeling.
But despite this, you can pay $29.95 for a two week supply of oxytocin to spritz onto
your skin.
As well as the pinch hitting the mainstream, so have the findings of another 2005 study
about oxytocin and trust.
This was done in a low number of participants.
They played an economic game and this economic game.
Is provide the measure of trust.
It wasn't a case of asking people, do you trust this person?
This was an economic game, which measures trusting behaviors.
So within this study, they found compared to placebo that oxytocin increases trusting
behaviors.
Now the original study received a LOT of media attention, but then other researchers struggled
to replicate it.
There was one that came out about two years ago, which had hundreds of participants compared
to the 20 or 30 they originally had, and they tried to replicate it.
They ran the experiment in exactly the same way.
They even had some of the authors from the original experiment . And they did it.
And they did not find the same effect
but what was interesting was that they did some exploratory analysis and they found that
people who had, lower disposition trust or people who didn't sort of trust other people
as, as a personality trait that they actually did find effects on oxytocin.
So it seems that.
Maybe it has an effect on trust.
It, isn't just a fact of, you can give it to anyone and you're instantly gonna trust
other people.
Perhaps it may have some effects for people who, for some reason or other are not trusting
of other people.
But that's science.
We have an hypothesis.
We, we don't find what we find.
We do some exploratory stuff and this helps guide future research.
Research has found that oxytocin is way more complicated than we originally thought.
It is a mother-child bonding hormone, but it can also be a defend-my-child-at-all-costs
hormone as well.
And this extends beyond motherhood and animals.
I have heard people suggest that we should drop oxytocin bombs into war zones in order
to make the opposing sides make up.
Uh, that is a terrible idea, even if it were to work.
Oxytocin is interesting because not only does it actually, increase bonds between your in
group, your friends, the people you identify with it actually antagonizes you against the
out group.
And it makes you treat the other people a lot worse.
So if we were to drop oxytocin bonds into war zones, it actually make things a lot worse.
It wouldn't bring peace.
It, it would just bring more conflict.
Oxytocin can't be simplified into being something that's "all good" - it's sophisticated and
leads to all kinds of different behaviours:
For a long time, we thought that oxytocin was this positive pro-social hormone.
Then there was, one study which found out that oxytocin increases schadenfreude.
I'm sorry to anyone who's German speaking, who just heard me say that, that is getting
pleasure from seeing the misfortune of others.
One way to think of it is it's kind of like a boat and a motor in that oxytocin provides,
provides the motion, but the rudder actually provides the direction.
So it may be positive or it may be negative.
Like a lot of areas of science, we need more research to understand how it works and in
whom
For oxytocin that you can get from a pharmacist, can that be useful for certain populations?
Like, for example, for people on the autism spectrum, is that useful
perhaps there's been a lot of mixed research on this.
So there was a study done in 2016 where, um, children with autism were given oxytocin for
five weeks and then given placebo for five weeks.
They found that the parents reported increased or improved social behaviors under oxytocin.
There's been various studies which have found similar results, but there's been other studies
as well, which have not found results.
And a lot of it seems to depend on the types of measures people are using.
And it's also important to understand that autism is a very heterogeneous.
People with autism are very, very different.
What may work for one individual may not necessarily work for another individual.
I still wouldn't recommend now going to the pharmacy or getting a prescription if you
want to, um, boost social behaviors because we, we just don't know if it works and how
it works.
And that's some of the, that's some of the research that we're doing at our lab at the
university of Oslo.
We're looking at different ways that oxytocin can actually impact on social behaviors and
on, on repetitive behaviors, which is another characteristic of autism.
And we're also doing a lot of brain imaging studies to actually find out what is actually
going on in the brain.
We almost need to take a step back to understand what's it actually doing before we can take
two steps forward.
Overall, the tale of the so-called "hug hormone" persists because we want it to be a nice story
We want to believe that there is something within us that is as simple as this hormone.
Equals connection.
This hormone is something which when we're having a positive experience, it is increased.
Unfortunately physiology is not that straightforward.
Science is nuanced!
Stories are messy and they don't always have a clear beginning, middle and end.
In fact, the story of science is always evolving, and that's what makes it so cool and interesting.
Oxytocin plays a bunch of different roles in many of our behaviours, which differ from
person to person.
We're only beginning to understand why.
And that's okay!
It's also okay to hug a partner or your dog just because it's nice and not necessarily
for a hormone life hack.
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