

Oxytocin Modulates Sociosexual Behavior in Female Mice - mercurialshark
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867414011696

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scythe
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...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/06/are_certain_behaviors
--_and_jo.html)

> _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._

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ritchiea
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.

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GuiA
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."_

~~~
cowpig
I feel like there's an in-between to be found

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kens
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8437022)

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jjallen
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.

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switchb4
Wow! This is interesting and kind of motivating also

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

