Bridget Jones’s Diary makes me snort. I mean that literally. I emit a scornful guttural sound whenever I see it, which, unfortunately, happens a lot in my house. It’s one of my wife’s go-to cable movies , and it definitely doesn’t make her snort. It makes her laugh and smile and sometimes tear up, especially when Colin Firth is on the screen.
This problem has long been irreconcilable , but thanks to a new study by a pair of German and British researchers, we may someday be able to hug it out. According to their findings, all it would take is a quick squirt of the hormone oxytocin up my nose, and I’d be swooning over Bridget too. What’s more, past research has shown that the same chemical that could smooth over a couple’s differences in cinematic taste might also be used in labs and hospitals to mitigate much more serious social-relation problems, like those associated with autism and schizophrenia.
Pumped out by the hypothalamus, oxytocin is known more colloquially as the “cuddle chemical.” As any pregnant woman knows and any spouse of a pregnant woman learns, it soars during labor and nursing, triggering contractions and aiding in the letdown of milk, and plays a major role in mother-baby bonding. New dads get a big slug of the stuff in their bloodstream too, but usually not until after the baby is born. Oxytocin is also partly responsible for even getting couples to the new-parent stage: it’s released in both men and women during sex, giving post-romp bonding a chemical boost.
Psychiatrist Rene Hurlemann of Bonn University and neuroscientist Keith Kendrick of the Cambridge Babraham Institute were well acquainted with the power of oxytocin when it’s released the way nature intended. What they wanted to determine is if it could be artificially administered to a person to manipulate feelings of empathy and perhaps even learning. “Both learning and empathy are part of what’s known as social cognition,” says Hurlemann. “That’s our ability to feel what other people are feeling and take their point of view.”
