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Family conflicts can be solved with a hormone
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Pharmacologists offer married couples, in which partners have already cooled towards each other and there are constant quarrels, to correct the situation by using a hormonal spray. We are talking about a spray with oxytocin, the "hug hormone".
The study found that the drug made women calmer and friendlier, while men were more sensitive, helping them react better during arguments. The findings were published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
At the University of Zurich, scientists specifically studied how the hormone affects stress levels and the autonomic nervous system during quarrels between partners using 47 couples as an example. The researchers specifically chose a topic that was painful for the couple. Then they gave them a spray with oxytocin or a placebo and left them for 45 minutes.
In order to assess the volunteers' condition, saliva samples were taken for analysis. It turned out that oxytocin helped men communicate on a difficult topic in a more positive way, and women were less demanding. In women, the activity of the autonomic nervous system decreased, in men - increased.
Apparently, oxytocin reduced emotional and physiological arousal in women after the conflict. The opposite happened in men. Why increased emotionality in men helped resolve the conflict, scientists do not know. One thing is certain: oxytocin spray improves libido in men.
Note:
The effect of oxytocin on the psycho-emotional sphere of men has been discovered. It is assumed that oxytocin is involved in love. Such experiments are usually not conducted on women. It causes a more favorable disposition towards other people, allows you to believe the words of a specific person, but only in certain cases: this applies only to intra-group relations - a person's attitude towards people from other groups does not change for the better or for the worse (the so-called "parochial altruism"). The hormone is involved immediately after childbirth in the formation of the mother-child relationship. The manifestation of autism and Williams syndrome depends on the concentration of oxytocin