Oxytocin
Effect Profile
How Oxytocin scores across 8 body systems
21
/ 80 total
Top strengths
Purrptide digest
Oxytocin is the closing entry on this list for a reason — it's the one nearly everyone has actually felt, every time they hugged someone they love. Released during physical touch, childbirth, breastfeeding, and social bonding, it's been studied intranasally for effects ranging from anxiety reduction to social cognition. Research into autism spectrum applications shows mixed but genuinely promising results on social recognition tasks — still early, still actively studied, and one of the more human-relevant entries on this entire list.
What this means for you
Already part of your daily biology — every hug is a free dose. The intranasal/supplemental research is about amplifying an effect you already know.
Synthetic oxytocin (Pitocin) is already a standard obstetric tool. The intranasal social-cognition research is a separate, earlier-stage application.
Mixed but promising autism-spectrum social cognition results make this a genuinely active and meaningful research area, not a dead end.
Already commercially established in obstetrics. The social-cognition and psychiatric applications represent a real, still-developing expansion.
For the nerds
Oxytocin increases gaze to the eye region of human faces
Biological Psychiatry · DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.09.020
Read full paper on PubMed →