Showing posts with label Oxytocin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oxytocin. Show all posts

Stressing Out And Your Love Hormone


The job scene in most countries is bad – unless you are among the 1% of course – and the stress of applying for jobs and waiting to get turned down only gets worse when you get the invitation to the dreaded job interview. On the day, you stress over how you should look – not too formal, yet not too casual – and rehearse replies to likely questions. Of course, you checked out the prospective employers website and try and remember those intelligent questions to ask if there is one of those awkward pauses that cry out to be filled.

Maybe you have the luxury of a sympathetic partner who can calm you down. Their interest and empathy can help that critical flow of oxytocin, which makes the world look better. Oxytocin is a large molecule that is made up of nine amino acids and seeks out your oxytocin receptors (OXTR) to bind tightly to them. Those in your central nervous system modulate your anxiety and stress levels, enhances empathy and quiet you aggression.

Hopefully you won’t have the rs53576 polymorphism in your OXTRs or you're out of luck. Those kind words won’t work too well as the binding of your oxytocin isn’t too good and it runs to waste. Chen et al in this week’s early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy have just published the study to clarify that idea (1).

The experiment was to put 184 young guys through a moderate stress job interview situation and measure the cortisol levels in their saliva to see how stressed they were. Half the group had 10 minutes of their female friends doing their best to calm them with as much support as they could muster – just the situation to release lots of oxytocin and reduce their stress levels.

Results? Those participants that received social support and had regular OXTRs had half the level of cortisol of the guys with no support. 29 of the guys had the rs53576 polymorphism and those who had their support group with them had just as much stress as those without.

Fortunately, the rs53576 polymorphism is recessive, but there are a lot of us out there who won’t benefit from lots of hugs and kind words as we go into a stressful situation. Maybe that’s the time for a good slug of whisky a few minutes before we take on the interview panels. Be careful though, too big a slug of “Dutch courage” could be counter-productive.

  1. PNAS Early Edition  doi/10.1073/pnas.1113079108

Comforting Words


Whether we are children or adults, if we are having a bad time we all respond to comforting words from a friend, spouse, parent or even a kindly passer-by. Often “good advice” isn’t what’s needed, but just the soothing sounds of sympathy. “There, there, don’t cry” doesn’t sound very helpful to a child with a cut knee. However, it usually works better than a detailed description of how we are going to clean it up and what might happen if it’s neglected, let alone what complications should be looked for in the future.

There are some situations in which we can’t be there in person, but the cell phone is now becoming almost universal, so we can elicit some soothing sympathetic words to comfort us that way. But what about instant messaging or texting? Can that do the job?

Seltzer et al of the U of Wisconsin-Madison set out to study exactly that and they have a pre-print that is flashing around in cyber-space as we speak (1). In their set of experiments, the ‘lab rats’ were young girls who were stressed out somewhat so the level of cortisol in their saliva was nicely elevated. Some were allowed to talk to their Moms, some over the phone and some in the flesh, whilst others were allowed to instant message and some, the valiant control group, just had to tough it out.

Talking to Mom, phone or in person, dropped cortisol levels and produced oxytocin, a hormone that induces calmness and decreases fear. Instant messaging did nothing like that, and their cortisol levels stayed as high as those who were just trying to get over it. The conclusion was that it is the sound of the familiar voice that helps and not the words.

However, the familiar may be especially potent, but I’m sure that sympathetic noises will work well even from an unfamiliar source. Maybe we should write a smart-phone app that will come out with a random variety of sympathetic phrases with a soft comforting voice speaking them. Then we can listen to a random selection to calm us down in stressful situations. Music helps, but the right voice might be better.

  1. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.05.004