If you read Natalie Angier’s 1999 book Woman—An Intimate Geography, you’ll (hopefully) learn a lot about the hormone oxytocin. The media has given oxytocin such popular names as “the bonding hormone,” or “the love hormone,” or even “the let-down hormone.” Along with other peptides, such as prolactin, oxytocin triggers a rather amazing dance in women who are about to breastfeed their infants. According to Angier’s research, oxytocin calms the mind, triggers the milk let-down process (e.g., causes contractions of the milk glands, which then expresses milk into the milk ducts), and even calms the gut. Wow, oxytocin has a lot going on, in fact “it’s hot” (apologies to Paris Hilton). “How so?” you ask. Angier tells us that as a result of the milk let-down process, a woman’s breast turns warm, “warmer than it’s ever been” (quoting Angier). Angier continues, “Heat radiates from the nursing woman as though she were feverish, as though she were flagstone in the sun.” Allow me to quote Angier at length as she in turn quotes Kerstin Uvnas-Mölberg of the Karolinska Institute in Sweeden:
Isn’t that the substrate for love? To transmit warmth? When we talk about a loving person, we call her a warm person. A person who refuses to love is called a cold person. In this case, psychology has borrowed from deep aspects of physiology.
But why should hormones that both calm the mind and trigger a milk let-down process go along with hormones that calm the gut? According to Angier’s research, breastfeeding eats up a lot of calories. To make up for the caloric loss associated with breastfeeding, the gut is calmed, which apparently increases caloric gain. Pretty amazing stuff. According to Angier, feeling anxious wastes calories; feeling calm conserves them. “Oxytocin is a giving hormone, and it is a conservative hormone,” so says Angier. Angier simply states: “Women with high anxiety levels also have low oxytocin levels.” Angier tells us that customs centered on “breaking bread together” were about creating a shared sense of being calm, of being satiated. Apparently we should be wary of a person who does not want to “break bread” with us because “that person doesn’t want to be calmed,” so says Angier. A person who doesn’t want to be calmed—to break bread with us—is a person who wishes to stay alert, to stay high-strung. Angier tells us that we tend to perceive such persons as threats. But wait, before we shun those non-bread breakers among us, maybe we should look at the possibility that staying alert, staying high-strung, staying insecure, and staying anxious might not be such a bad thing—the other head of a two-headed Janus perhaps.
An article that can be found at LiveScience.com entitled Being Bad at Relationships Is Good for Survival by JR Minkel, talks about how insecure attachment patterns may actually be a good thing. According to the article, which profiles work being done at the New School of Psychology in Herzliya, Israel, unlike people who are securely attached, insecurely attached people are able to more easily scan the environment for signs of trouble and then react to that trouble. The researchers pumped harmless smoke into a room and it was the insecurely attached types who were quick to both recognize the potential danger and react to it. Apparently the insecurely attached types, who tend to stay alert and stay high-strung, took control and ushered the securely attached types out of the smoke-filled room.
Now, lets look at another article, which, again, can be found over at LiveScience.com, entitled Love Hormone Could Also Lead to War. Jeremy Hsu wrote this article. Here’s Hsu’s tagline for the article (with my comments in brackets): “A brain hormone [oxytocin] that fosters fuzzy feelings between mothers and children [as looked at above] may also goad soldiers to launch preemptive strikes in defense of their comrades, according to new research.” The plot thickens. Apparently oxytocin in men, actually, groups of men, can set off their own particular type of dance. Busy little hormone. Hsu gives us this quote from Carsten De Dreu, a social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam and one of the researchers involved in studying the role oxytocin plays in male functioning: “Our study shows that oxytocin not only plays a role in modulating cooperation and benevolence, but also in driving aggression.” Apparently oxytocin can help to facilitate the formation of a cooperative and cohesive in-group identity among men (the researchers did not run any studies with women). However, once that identity or group bonding has been formed, the oxytocin can then fuel the desire to protect that bonding or identity from threat by an out-group or enemy, even to the point of a preemptive strike. I may be way off base here but isn’t that what mothers—whether human mothers or bear mothers or wolf mothers—do as well: protect that bond, that mother-infant identification, at all cost even to the point of engaging in a preemptive strike. I guess you could say that war is hell whether guarding the home or the homeland. Hsu gives us this “bottom line”: “Giving oxytocin to everyone in the world won’t necessarily usher in a new era of peace and prosperity. It might even spur more paranoia and conflict between different groups and nations.” Maybe we should look at oxytocin as the “calm before the storm.”
