Hormone Oxytocin Could Relieve Distress in the Anxious and Depressed
Scientists at Concordia’s Centre for Human Development have provided evidence that rather than hiding or avoiding people due to social rejection, it is better to reach out to others for support. Doing this positively impacts one’s mood, while avoidance generally increases their anxiety and depression, and decreases their trust in others.
Mark Ellenbogen and Christopher Cardoso, the researchers running the study, discovered that the hormone oxytocin may significantly help us in reaching out to others for support when faced with stressful social situations.
While it has been well documented that oxytocin plays a significant role in childbirth and breastfeeding, and more recently that it increases our willingness to trust strangers, it has not been studied in social rejection scenarios. Their study concludes that that oxytocin can help increase a person’s trust in others following social rejection.
Ellenbogen explains, “that means that instead of the traditional ‘fight or flight’ response to social conflict where people get revved up to respond to a challenge or run away from it, oxytocin may promote the ‘tend and befriend’ response where people reach out to others for support after a stressful event. That can, in turn, strengthen social bonds and may be a healthier way to cope.”
The experiment was a double-blind study, in which 100 students were given either oxytocin or a placebo via a nasal spray, and then subjected to social rejection. They were placed into conversations that were staged to simulate real life, where researchers posing as students in a classroom disagreed with, interrupted, or ignored the participants.
Using mood and personality questionnaires, the data showed that participants who were very distressed after being rejected reported greater trust in other people if they sniffed oxytocin prior to the experiment, but not if they sniffed the placebo.
Perhaps oxytocin could provide help to those with depression and anxiety, and social anxiety in particular, since socially anxious people have hard time trusting other people, and tend not to seek out social support after rejections.
Since avoidance generally just makes anxiety and depression worse, taking oxytocin via nasal spray before social encounters could seem to help relieve the stress of people with social anxiety or depression, and possibly increase their social bonding in future encounters, so they could begin to produce more of the hormone naturally in their brains.
Published 6/25/2013
Our History and Our Mission
The Anxiety Network began in 1995 due to growing demand from people around the world wanting help in understanding and overcoming their anxiety disorder. The Anxiety Clinic of Arizona and its website, The Anxiety Network, received so much traffic and requests for help that we found ourselves spending much of our time in international communication and outreach. Our in-person anxiety clinic has grown tremendously, and our principal internet tool, The Anxiety Network, has been re-written and re-designed with focus on the three major anxiety disorders: panic, social anxiety, and generalized anxiety disorder.
The Anxiety Network focuses on three of the major anxiety disorders: panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and social anxiety disorder.
In 1997, The Social Anxiety Association, a non-profit organization, was formed and now has its own website.
The Social Anxiety Institute, the largest site on the internet for information and treatment of social anxiety, has maintained an active website since 1998. Continuous, ongoing therapy groups have helped hundreds of people overcome social anxiety since 1994.
Follow Dr. Richards
