My Mother? Let Me Tell You About My Mother.

In Blade Runner, Leon Kowalski (played by Brion James) kills a ‘blade runner’ — an investigator searching for replicants, engineered humans — when asked ‘Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about… your mother.’

It turns out that Leon’s reaction could be more human than we might have thought.

Ed Yong, The dark side of oxytocin, much more than just a “love hormone”

Jennifer Bartz from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine has found that oxytocin can have completely opposite effects on the way people behave, depending on how they view their relationships to other people.

She recruited 31 men* and asked them to sniff either an oxytocin nasal spray or another spray with the same ingredients minus oxytocin – a placebo. A few weeks later, the sprays were swapped so that the men who took oxytocin now took the placebo, and vice versa. At the time, neither the scientists nor the volunteers knew which was which – that was only revealed after the experiment was over.

Before all of this, the men completed a series of widely used questionnaires to measure the state of their social ties. The questions assessed the nature of their bonds with their families and friends, how sensitive they are to rejection, how comfortable they are at being close to other people, how much they desire that closeness, and more. Shortly after using both sprays, the recruits also answered questions about their mother’s parenting style.

Bartz found that when she averaged out the volunteers’ results, the sniffs of oxytocin hadn’t seemed to colour their memories of their mothers. But things changed when she looked at them individually. Those who felt more anxious about their relationships took a dimmer view of their mother’s parenting styles when they sniffed oxytocin, compared to the placebo. Those who were more secure in their relationships reacted in the opposite way – they remembered mum as being closer and more caring when they took the oxytocin.

These results show that oxytocin is far from being a simple “love hormone”. As Bartz says, it has a “more nuanced role… than previously thought,” and one that varies from person to person.  It’s “not an all-purpose attachment panacea.”

For now, Bartz isn’t sure why oxytocin can have such different effects. Her most educated guess is that the hormone triggers a biased trip down memory lane. Under its influence, people are more likely to remember information about their mother that fits with their current attitudes to relationships. If they are anxious, they’re more likely to remember the negative side of their early life. It’s a reasonable enough idea, and one that Bartz intends to test in the future.

So our perception of our current social relationships influences the way we think about relationships in general, and in specific, when we reminisce about mom. When we get dosed with oxytocin, it uses our current sense of sociality as an amplifier for the specific case, and mom seems more or less caring, depending on how we feel.

To extrapolate to other settings, like the business context, we can imagine a parallel: those that feel positive about their company social network would be more likely to express positive observations about the way the company is operating, and their relationship with the company, and other individuals in the company. And vice versa.