A dose of oxytocin can reduce romantic jealousy in both men and women
rael-science
A dose of oxytocin can reduce romantic jealousy in both men and women
The
neuropeptide oxytocin can reduce jealousy in established romantic
partners when administered intranasally, according to new research
published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
The findings provide further evidence that oxytocin influences the
brain in a manner that promotes the strengthening of romantic bonds.
“Jealousy
is a widely experienced emotion in romantic relationships and can
result in domestic violence and break-ups. In extreme cases romantic
jealousy can become pathological leading to a morbid condition termed
‘Othello syndrome,'” said study author Xiaoxiao Zheng, a postdoctoral
fellow in the Brain Cognition and Brain Disease Institute at the Chinese
Academy of Sciences.
“However,
relatively little research has been conducted on the causes of jealousy
and potential ways of reducing it. The neuropeptide oxytocin has
sometimes been referred to as the ‘love hormone’ and is important for
the formation of both parental bonds and ones between couples. However,
in humans there is increasing evidence that it may also help to maintain
bonds by reducing couple conflict and reducing interest in attractive
strangers of the opposite sex.”
“My
colleagues and I therefore decided to investigate whether we could show
that administering oxytocin intranasally might help in maintaining
existing bonds by reducing feelings of jealousy towards a partner in a
laboratory controlled context where romantic jealousy is evoked in
response to imagined or real contexts of partner infidelity.”
The
study included 70 heterosexual couples in a stable intimate
relationship. The participants first completed a set of validated
psychological assessments. They were then randomly assigned to receive a
dose of oxytocin or placebo before completing two related tasks in the
laboratory.
One
task involved imagining their partner committing various acts of
emotional or sexual infidelity and then rating their emotional reaction.
In another task, the participants were asked to play a virtual
Cyberball game with their partner and a stranger. Unbeknownst to the
participants, the game was a pre-programmed scenario designed to evoke
jealousy by systematically excluding them while the person who they
believed to be their partner and the stranger played together.
The
researchers found, in both tasks, that participants who received
oxytocin tended to report feeling less jealous compared to participants
who had not received oxytocin.
“Our
study provided the first evidence that an intranasally administered
dose of oxytocin can help reduce feelings of jealousy in both sexes and
in both real and imagined contexts of partner’s infidelity,” Zheng told
PsyPost.
“This
further supports a role for oxytocin in helping to maintain romantic
bonds but also demonstrates that it may have therapeutic application,
particularly in pathological cases. Importantly, oxytocin is released
normally in response to warm contact between partners so hugs and
touching and kissing may help to prevent a partner from succumbing to
the ‘green-eyed monster’ in social contexts involving others.”
The findings are in line with a previous neuroimaging study, which found that oxytocin reduced activation of the anterior cingulate cortex when imagining infidelity.
It
is possible that the intranasal administration of oxytocin could be
used to treat pathological jealousy. But the researchers cautioned that
more work needs to be done.
“At
this stage a major caveat is that so far we have only shown a positive
effect of oxytocin administration on reducing jealousy in a laboratory
controlled context,” Zheng said. “Clearly it will be important going
forward to determine whether oxytocin treatment can help alleviate the
extreme symptoms of pathological romantic jealousy and also whether
encouraging behaviors which promote natural oxytocin release can help to
reduce romantic jealousy in everyday contexts.”
“It
will also be important to establish the neural mechanisms underlying
the effect of oxytocin on romantic jealousy using brain imaging
approaches. Given that some individuals are more prone to jealousy than
others it will also be important to establish modulatory influences of
early negative or positive experiences of attachment and love
attitudes.”
The study, “Intranasal oxytocin may help maintain romantic bonds by decreasing jealousy evoked by either imagined or real partner infidelity“, was authored by Xiaoxiao Zheng, Xiaolei Xu, Lei Xu, Juan Kou, Lizhu Luo, Xiaole Ma, and Keith M. Kendrick
