Oxytocin Can Improve Compassion in People with PTSD

Angela

Elite member
Messages
21,823
Reaction score
12,327
Points
113
Ethnic group
Italian
If it worked for everyone, toward everyone, they could put it in the water supply. :) Many of society's ills might ameliorate.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way. It only seems to increase compassion toward women... Evolutionary programming?

See:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160310112400.htm

"In the present study -- conducted by Professor Shamay-Tsoory together with Professor Ehud Klein, Director of Psychiatry at the Rambam Medical Center, and Dr. Sharon Palgi, the Head of the psychologists' team in the Psychiatric Day-Care Department at Rambam Medical Center, who conducted the study as part of her Ph.D. work at the University of Haifa -- the researchers examined whether patients with post-traumatic stress disorder suffer from deficits in compassion. In addition, the researchers sought to investigate whether intranasal oxytocin, a hormone that's known to modulate social behaviors, may enhance compassion in these patients."

"The findings suggest that patients with PTSD suffer from significant and comprehensive deficits in compassion. These deficits may indicate that in response to the distress of the other, patients with PTSD may have difficulty in inferring and understanding the circumstances leading to this distress, and may failed to act with compassion in light of distress others. "The difficulty in the ability to feel compassion may be due to problems in the ability to identify, understand, and empathize with the other's state of distress, i.e., difficulties in emotional and cognitive empathy. These difficulties in empathy and compassion may relate to social problems that characterize patients with post-traumatic stress disorder," said the researchers."

"The study also found that a single intranasal dose of Oxytocin enhances compassion, both in patients with PTSD and in healthy participants -- but only toward women, while it does not affect compassion toward men. From an evolutionary perspective one of the Oxytocin roles is to moderate pro-social behaviors, including compassion, mainly toward the survival of weaker and vulnerable individuals within groups, including females, pregnant females and offspring, who cannot defend themselves in nature, in light of the stress. "
 
Interesting, however, I'd take it with a less titanic sized grain of salt if the populations used were larger than 32 PTSD and 30 "normal" people. Extremely limited. I'd be interested in seeing the results of studies done by peers, which is a true indication of any study's legitimacy, before jumping the gun. Particularly when the "hormone of love" is not that simple - there's a number of rather negative backlashes to taking it for any length of time for certain people, addiction been a minor issue compared to some [learning disabilities, memory problems, and it can even amplify negative feelings towards other people considerably].
 

This thread has been viewed 3359 times.

Back
Top