An Allostatic Theory of Oxytocin.

Oxytocin has garnered considerable interest for its role in social behavior, as well as for the potential of intranasal administration to treat social difficulties. However, current theoretical models for the role of oxytocin in social behavior pay little consideration to its evolutionary and developmental history. This article aims to broaden our understanding of the role of oxytocin in social behavior by adopting an ethological approach through the lens of Nikolaas Tinbergen's 'four questions' - how does oxytocin work; how does the role of oxytocin change during development; how does oxytocin enhance survival; and how did the oxytocin system evolve? We argue that oxytocin is most accurately described as an allostatic hormone that modulates both social and non-social behavior by maintaining stability through changing environments.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences

• Publication date

  2020-04-29

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tics.2020.03.008PMID 32360118
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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