It seems that oxytocin is two-faced. The hormone that promotes feelings of love, social bonding, and well-being can also cause emotional pain, an entirely new, darker identity for the much studied hormone. The new findings, by researchers from Northwestern University, come from two experiments detailed in the journal Nature Neuroscience. In the first experiment, three […]
Fear can skew our perception of approaching objects, causing us to underestimate the distance of a threatening one, according to researchers from Emory University and the University of London. The findings, published in Current Biology, show that emotion and perception are subtly intertwined in the mind. To explore our perception of when objects heading towards […]
Canadian researchers say that an adult fear of the dark may be a contributing factor in cases of insomnia. The findings, based upon a study of a small group of Toronto college students, were presented this week at the SLEEP 2012 conference in Boston. Taryn Moss, the study’s lead author, said that nearly half of […]
In the first study of its kind, researchers from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex and the University of California in Santa Barbara have found homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex. The work, published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is the first to […]
A brain imaging study at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has discovered that the fear-processing circuitry in the human brain appears to be short-circuited by the brain chemical oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the “trust” hormone. The scans of oxytocin’s effects on the human brain reveal that it quells the brain’s fear hub, […]
