Oxytocin can improve compassion in people with symptoms of PTSD

Posted on March 11, 2016

Photo: flickr

Oxytocin -- "the love hormone" -- may enhance compassion of people suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to new study conducted at the University of Haifa and Rambam Health Care Campus: "The fact that the present study found, that Oxytocin may improvement compassion among patients with post-traumatic stress disorder toward women, provides new evidence that oxytocin may be able to improve the social behavior of these patients," said Professor Simone Shamay-Tsoory from the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa, who led the study.

The study included 32 patients with post-traumatic stress disorder and 30 healthy subjects with no history of psychiatric disorders. All participants were randomly assigned to groups for the first administration of either Ocytocin or placebo.

The findings suggest that patients with PTSD suffer from significant and comprehensive deficits in compassion.

"The difficulty in the ability to feel compassion may be due to problems in the ability to identify, understand, and empathize with the other's state of distress, i.e., difficulties in emotional and cognitive empathy. These difficulties in empathy and compassion may relate to social problems that characterize patients with post-traumatic stress disorder," said the researchers.

The study also found that a single intranasal dose of Oxytocin enhances compassion, both in patients with PTSD and in healthy participants -- but only toward women, while it does not affect compassion toward men.

This evolutionary explanation can illuminate on the findings from the current study, that Oxytocin enhance compassion towards women, but not toward men. "If the stories of children with distress were included in our study, it is possible that Oxytocin were enhances compassion toward that stories even more," they remarked.


Category(s):Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) / Trauma / Complex PTSD

Source material from University of Haifa