Fresh Questions About Oxytocin as the ‘Love Hormone’ Behind Pair Bonding - Neuroscience News

The results indicate that the biology underlying pair bonding and parenting isn’t purely dictated by the receptors for oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the “love hormone.”

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.

The current project emerged from shared interests between Manoli and co-senior author and neurobiologist Nirao Shah, MD, PhD, then at UCSF and now at Stanford Medicine.

“If we can find the key pathway that mediates attachment and bonding behavior,” Shah said, “We’ll have an eminently druggable target for alleviating symptoms in autism, schizophrenia, many other psychiatric disorders.”

Authors: Additional authors include: Ruchira Sharma, Rose Larios, Nastacia Goodwin, Michael Sherman and Isidero Espineda of UCSF, Maricruz Alvarado Mandujano, YiChao Wei, Srinivas Parthasarthy and Joseph Knoedler of Stanford, and Forrest Rogers, Trenton Simmons, Adele Seelke, Jessica Bond, and Karen Bales of UC Davis, and Annaliese Beery of UC Berkeley.

Oxtr mutants displayed social attachment such that males and females showed a behavioral preference for their mating partners over a stranger of the opposite sex, even when assayed using different experimental setups.