Prairie voles can find love without the 'love hormone' oxytocin, study finds
The hormone oxytocin plays a key role in long-term relationships. But a study of prairie voles finds that the animals mate for life even without help from the "love hormone."
There's more to love than a single hormone.
That's the conclusion of a study of prairie voles that were genetically altered to ignore signals from the "love hormone" oxytocin.
The study, published in the journal Neuron, comes after decades of research suggesting that behaviors like pair-bonding and parenting depend on oxytocin. Many of those studies involved prairie voles, which mate for life and are frequently used to study human behavior.
"Oxytocin might, an author of the paper and a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco.
