'Love hormone' helps memory
2009-01-07 08:30
London - The "love" hormone linked to
feelings of sexual pleasure, bonding and maternal care also
appears to help us recognise familiar faces, Swiss researchers
said on Tuesday.
Men given oxytocin - involved in nursing and childbirth -
more accurately recalled images of familiar faces but the
hormone did not help them recognise inanimate objects, Peter
Klaver of the University of Zurich and colleagues said.
Their findings published in The Journal of Neuroscience
suggest the hormone somehow strengthens the brain's neural
networks involved in social memory and may have implications for
conditions such as autism, researchers said.
"The study highlights the parallels in social information
processing in mice and man, and adds further support to the
notion oxytocin plays a critical role," Larry Young, an expert
on oxytocin at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved
in the study, said in a statement.
Social information processing
"This has important implications for disorders such as
autism, where social information processing is clearly
impaired."
Oxytocin was known for years to be involved in labour and it
is the hormone that stimulates the production of milk for
breastfeeding.
Animal studies suggest it can help in bonding
between mother and child and between mates.
Only in recent decades has it been found to have a function
in men - in sexual arousal and function.
Klaver and colleagues showed 44 men pictures of faces and
inanimate objects that included sculptures, houses and other
images.
Half the volunteers received an oxytocin nasal spray and
the rest got a placebo.
The researchers found that men who used the oxytocin spray
more accurately recognised the faces they had seen before than
did those in the placebo group.
The hormone made no difference
for the other pictures, Klaver said.
Further analysis also showed the hormone made it less likely
for people to mistakenly characterise unfamiliar faces as
familiar, the researchers said.
"It is important to understand that social recognition can
be improved by such hormones," Klaver said in a telephone
interview.