1: “Picture moms or dads showering their baby with kisses, tickling their baby’s tiny fingers and toes, smiling at their baby, and speaking to him or her in that high-pitched, singsong tone that scientists call motherese,” Barbara Fredrickson writes in her book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do and Become.
What does science tell us is happening here?
One word: Oxytocin. Also known as the “cuddle hormone” or the “love hormone.”
First things first, Barbara writes: Oxytocin isn’t a hormone, but a neuropeptide “because it acts not just within our bodies but also within our brains.”
Oxytocin plays a vital role in social bonding and attachment. When a parent is super-attentive, as described above, “they’re also closely tracking their baby’s face for signs that their delight is mutual,” Barbara observes.
When the baby responds in kind by babbling, cooing, and giggling, “positivity resonates back and forth between them,” she notes.
The result? “Micro-moments of love blossom,” Barbara writes.
This positive behavioral synchrony, or “the degree to which an infant and a parent (through eye contact and affectionate touch) laugh, smile, and coo together,” she notes, maps directly to an increase in the amount of oxytocin in their saliva.
Early research into the impact of oxytocin focused on prairie voles who were given the neuropeptide in the presence of the opposite sex.
What happened? “A long-lasting preference to remain together with the other,” Barbara writes, “cuddled up side by side.”
For people, “oxytocin surges during sexual intercourse for both men and women, and, for women, during childbirth and lactation,” she shares, “pivotal interpersonal moments that stand to forge new social bonds or cement existing ones.”
2: More recently, scientists have examined the impact of oxytocin in more subtle areas of social connection.
“Oxytocin appears both to calm fears that might steer us away from interacting with strangers,” Barbara observes, “and also to sharpen our skills for connection.”
Oxytocin reduces cortisol, the stress hormone, causing us to act more positively by sharing our feelings and making more eye contact and warm gestures.
“Related research shows that behaving kindly in these ways also raises our naturally occurring levels of oxytocin, which in turn curbs stress-induced rises in heart rate and blood pressure, reduces feelings of depression, and increases our pain thresholds.”
3: But with higher levels of oxytocin, do we make ourselves more susceptible to being deceived or exploited?
Not so.
“From this work, I can tell you that, under the influence of oxytocin, we attend more to people’s eyes and become specifically more attuned to their smiles, especially subtle ones,” Barbara writes.
“It indeed heightens our attunement to cues that signal whether others are sincere or not,” she notes.
“Through eye contact and close attention to all manner of smiles—and the embodied simulations such visual intake triggers—our gut instincts about whom to trust and whom not to trust become more reliable.”
More tomorrow!
_______________________
Reflection: Am I aware of those moments when my oxytocin levels are likely elevated? How do I feel?
Action: Pay attention today to moments of connection.
What did you think of this post?
