Both Larry Young (Yerkes/Center for Translational Social Neuroscience) and Robert Liu (Dept of Biology) were quoted last week in Science and National Geographic Phenomena commenting on research dealing with the hormone oxytocin and maternal behavior.
Young is well known for studying oxytocin’s role in pair bonding in voles, and Liu studies how mother mice learn to recognize their pups’ ultrasonic communications, making them both ideal for evaluating the new research.
Scientists at New York University found that oxytocin helps to focus the brains of new mother mice on their pups’ calls — specifically acting on a region of the brain responsible for processing sound. The paper was published in Nature — with a companion News + Views from Liu.
NatGeo blogger Ed Yong has been a critic of the “love hormone” hype surrounding oxytocin, and he and Young seem to have had a meeting of the minds on this Nature paper.
“This kind of study, which gets into details and doesn’t attribute fluffy psychological traits to this molecule, is exactly what we need to move the field forward,” LY tells EY.
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