The research found suggests oxytocin might spark the motivation to help an upset baby, according to an IU press release.
The new work is published by investigators from the IU-Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and ?Reproduction. The work explained an experiment giving women in the first six months postpartum and women who had never had children either a nasal dose of oxytocin or a nasal placebo. The subjects then viewed images of crying infants, smiling infants, sexual activity and neutral items like nature photos, according to the press release.
Brain activity measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging while the women viewed the images showed the oxytocin group had a significant increase in activation in a certain part of the brain. The region associated with reward circuiting lit up when the subjects viewed the crying infants and sexual images, according to Julia Heiman, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Oxytocin is a social protein-like molecule closely associated with nurturing behaviors such as breastfeeding and bonding that also increases in humans with touch and during orgasm. The researchers want to understand how depression affects the processing of the external world during the first six months postpartum, the time crucial to development and parental adaptations.
Though the postpartum period is associated with less sexual drive, this latest study shows variability.
The Kinsey Institute created a scale that measures ?sexual inhibition and sexual excitation. According to the scale, postpartum women reported lower desire, more inhibition and less excitation in general.
In contrast, women with a higher score on the scale also showed more activation in the brain with visual sexual stimuli, regardless of whether they were new or never mothers.
Former IU graduate student Rebecca Gregory, IU senior scientist Hu Cheng, Kinsey research fellow Heather A. Rupp and IU professor Dale R. Sengelaub, were co-authors with Heiman on the paper, “Oxytocin increases VTA activation to infant and sexual stimuli in nulliparous and postpartum women.”
Alyson Malinger
