SCIENCE DAILY
Baby monkeys. Oxytocin, the “love hormone” that builds mother-baby bonds and may help us feel more connected toward one another, can also make surly monkeys treat each other a little more kindly. CREDIT/ © David Cloud/Fotolia
Oxytocin, the “love hormone” that builds mother-baby bonds and may help us feel more connected toward one another, can also make surly monkeys treat each other a little more kindly.
Administering the hormone nasally through a kid-sized nebulizer, like a gas mask, a Duke University research team has shown that it can make rhesus macaques pay more attention to each other and make choices that give another monkey a squirt of fruit juice, even when they don’t get one themselves.
Two macaques were seated next to each other and trained to select symbols from a screen that represented giving a rewarding squirt of juice to one’s self, giving juice to the neighbor, or not handing out any juice at all. In repeated trials, they were faced with a choice between just two of these options at a time: reward to self vs. no reward; reward to self vs. reward to other; and reward to other vs. no reward.
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