Elsevier

Psychoneuroendocrinology

Volume 34, Issue 9, October 2009, Pages 1417-1422
Psychoneuroendocrinology

Short communication
Oxytocin enhances the experience of attachment security

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2009.04.002Get rights and content

Summary

Repeated interactions between infant and caregiver result in either secure or insecure relationship attachment patterns, and insecure attachment may affect individual emotion-regulation and health. Given that oxytocin enhances social approach behavior in animals and humans, we hypothesized that oxytocin might also promote the subjective experience of attachment security in humans. Within a 3-week interval, 26 healthy male students classified with an insecure attachment pattern were invited twice to an experimental session. At the beginning of each experiment, a single dose of oxytocin or placebo was administered intranasally, using a double-blind, placebo-controlled within-subject design. In both conditions, subjects completed an attachment task based on the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP). Thirty-two AAP picture system presentations depicted attachment-related events (e.g. illness, solitude, separation, and loss), and were each accompanied by four prototypical phrases representing one secure and three insecure attachment categories. In the oxytocin condition, a significant proportion of these insecure subjects (N = 18; 69%) increased in their rankings of the AAP prototypical “secure attachment” phrases and decreased in overall ranking of the “insecure attachment” phrases. In particular, there was a significant decrease in the number of subjects ranking the pictures with “insecure-preoccupied” phrases from the placebo to the oxytocin condition. We find that a single dose of intranasally administered oxytocin is sufficient to induce a significant increase in the experience of attachment security in insecurely attached adults.

Introduction

The fundamental ability to form attachment is essential for human social relationships. During repeated interactions with a supportive and sensitive caregiver, a child develops a stable cognitive-emotional schema of the caregiver's availability for reducing stress and providing comfort and protection in potentially threatening situations (Bowlby, 1969). Based on these assumptions, infants and adults are classified either as secure or insecure with regard to attachment using standardized measures designed to activate the individual's attachment system (Westen et al., 2006). Notably, attachment insecurity contributes to a wide spectrum of mental disorders (Maunder and Hunter, 2001).

In non-human mammals, receptors for the neuropeptide oxytocin are distributed in various brain regions that are associated with the ability to form normal social attachments and affiliation, including parental care, pair bonding, and social memory (Carter, 1998, Uvnas-Moberg, 1998, Young and Wang, 2004). Intranasal oxytocin administration in humans has been found to reduce endocrine and psychological responses to social stress (Heinrichs et al., 2003), to increase trust (Kosfeld et al., 2005), the ability to infer the mental state of another person (‘mind-reading’) (Domes et al., 2007a), social memory (Heinrichs et al., 2004, Guastella et al., 2008b), and gaze toward the eye region of human faces (Guastella et al., 2008a). Given that oxytocin seems to promote social approach behavior (Heinrichs and Domes, 2008), we hypothesized that oxytocin might also promote the experience of secure attachment in humans. In particular, intranasal oxytocin administration was expected to enhance the subjective perception of attachment security in insecurely attached individuals.

Section snippets

Methods and materials

In the present study, we recruited 26 healthy male students, aged 21–33 years, at the Technical University Munich (March to August, 2006) who were classified with an insecure attachment pattern using a standardized and validated adult attachment measure based on analyzing individual stories to attachment related pictures (Adult Attachment Projective Picture System—AAP; George and West, 2001). The AAP picture drawings depict attachment-related events (e.g. illness, solitude, separation, loss,

Results

Our hypothesis that oxytocin increases the subjective perception of attachment security implies that the subjects in the oxytocin condition will show more selections of those phrases representing secure attachment than subjects in the placebo condition. This would be indicated by increasing the rank of their selection of the “secure” phrases and, consequently, decreasing the rank of “insecure” phrases as their preferred descriptor. The experience of attachment security was operationalized by

Discussion

To our knowledge this is the first study that shows that a single dose of intranasally administered oxytocin is sufficient to enhance the experience of attachment security. Oxytocin seems to induce a momentary state of mind change in which subjects classified as insecure shift to higher rankings of attachment security. Attachment security is characterized as the individuals’ confidence to rely on attachment figures to achieve care, safety, and protection and, when alone, to have access to

Role of the funding source

This work was supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. PP001-114788) (to M.H.), and the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology (to M.-F.O.). The Swiss National Science Foundation and the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology had no further role in the study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of the data, writing of the report or decision to submit the paper for publication.

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. PP001-114788) (to M.H.), and the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology (to M.-F.O.). M.H. gratefully acknowledges support from the Research Priority Program ‘Foundations of Human Social Behavior’ at the University of Zurich.

References (25)

  • A. Bartel et al.

    The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love

    Neuroimage

    (2004)
  • J. Bowlby

    Attachment and Loss, vol. 1. Attachment

    (1969)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text