Oxytocin Modulates Sociosexual Behavior in Female Mice

Yeah, I love it when some two-bit mouse study is blown up by people who obviously don't have an agenda as though it supplies some universal truth about human behavior.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/06/are_certain_behaviors...

>I'm telling you this not because I care about finger lengths, but because you are being corrupted.

>The article doesn't even have to spell it out for you: they just have to write "there's a relationship to testosterone " and we'll make the cultural/social value judgments ourselves. But they leave nothing to chance; thus Time Magazine.

>That's not an unfortunate, unexpected by product of science-- it is the very point of it. In order for you to obtain this knowledge, you have to lose some other knowledge of equivalent value.

>Once it's happened, once you've allowed this into your brain, there is no escape, ever, any more than there is an escape from oil. No matter what else they discover, you will always have the suspicion that trading-- and lesbianism and risk taking and hand eye coordination-- are masculine traits.

Is this news? There have been studies for years showing Oxytocin (and also Vasopressin) is an important neurotransmitter in feelings of affection. I imagine the degree of the effect could be interesting, but I suspect this was voted up because of the original clickbaity title combined with being outside the typical domain for HN articles.

Non clickbait-y description of the paper (from their abstract):

"We report the discovery of a population of somatostatin (Sst)-positive, regular spiking interneurons that express the oxytocin receptor (OxtrINs). Silencing of OxtrINs in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of female mice resulted in loss of social interest in male mice specifically during the sexually receptive phase of the estrous cycle. This sociosexual deficit was also present in mice in which the Oxtr gene was conditionally deleted from the mPFC and in control mice infused with an Oxtr antagonist."

If you're getting a feeling of déjà vu, this paper was discussed 15 days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8437022

The graphical abstract is the best part about this. I don't read many real scientific papers anymore, so it was nice to see that.

Wow! This is interesting and kind of motivating also

Even with oxytocin, I would find it very hard to choose between a box of mice and a box of lego, if offered.