The cuddle chemical has a dark side. Oxytocin – a hormone thought to play a role in maternal bonding, trust and even attraction – amplifies feelings of envy and gloating, research suggests.
Volunteers who played a game involving monetary gains and losses felt more envy after an imaginary opponent’s wins if they had received a dose of oxytocin, compared with a placebo. Similarly, oxytocin boosted feelings of schadenfreude – pleasure at another’s misfortune – after volunteers won more money than their opponent.
“The bottom line is that [oxytocin] doesn’t only work on pro-social, positive emotions, it has a general effect on social emotions and it depends on the context,” says Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a cognitive scientist at the University of Haifa, Israel, who led the study.
Attraction to aggression
Previous work on animals has hinted at oxytocin’s double life. Female hamsters that received an infusion of oxytocin into a brain area where the hormone is known to have an effect responded more aggressively to intruders than hamsters that got no oxytocin. And newborn female voles that received an injection of oxytocin later responded more aggressively to males than other females.
Studies with humans, on the other hand, have suggested that oxytocin makes us more likely to trust others, find them attractive, and remember their faces. We even receive a flood of the stuff when we play with our pooches.
“No one actually examined if it can be involved in negative social emotions,” says Shamay-Tsoory. However, she admits her team expected to find that feelings of envy and gloating were tempered by the hormone.
To provoke these feelings in a lab, the researchers asked 59 subjects to play a game of chance against an opponent in another room – really a computer. Three doors of different colours appeared on a computer screen, and volunteers were told to pick one. They were told that behind one of the doors was a cash prize that they could keep.
Next, they saw a message indicating that their opponent was choosing, followed by the outcome of the contest. In some cases volunteers won more than their opponent, in other cases less.
After this decision, volunteers rated their feelings of envy, schadenfreude and happiness, as well as their feelings toward different colours. Shamay-Tsoory’s team told the volunteers that the researchers were testing how colours affect emotion, and the colour questions were intended to maintain this ruse.
Volunteers performed this task twice over the course of a week. On one occasion they received a dose of oxytocin, on the other a placebo. Shamay-Tsoory’s team then compared these trials for each volunteer.
On average, oxytocin boosted feelings of envy during financial losses. Similarly, volunteers on oxytocin experienced more schadenfreude versus a placebo in trials where they won more money than their opponent.
Shamay-Tsoory contends that her team’s results don’t contradict prior work suggesting a cheerier role for the cuddle chemical. “We know that envy and gloating are social emotions and also related to attachment and love,” she says. “We think it’s reasonable that oxytocin will also increase these social emotions.”
One problem with studying these darker aspects of personality is getting people to divulge them, Shamay-Tsoory says. “People don’t always like to admit that they feel envy and gloating,” she says.
Journal reference: Journal of Biological Psychiatry (DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.06.009)
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