Oxytocin And Vasopressin And Prosocial Behaviors

Social interactions are essential in everyday situations such as wooing a mate, the reproduction of offspring, and forming interpersonal relationships. ‘Prosociality’, which is an umbrella term, involves maternal and paternal care, social recognition, adult affiliation such as pair bonding and social bonding, and empathy and trust between people. Various literature has examined the roles of oxytocin and vasopressin in supporting prosocial behaviours. Oxytocin (OT), a nonapeptide hormone regulated by estrogen, is especially relevant to females and is crucial to lactation and parturition (Campbell, 2008). Vasopressin (VP), on the other hand, is more relevant to males and involves with sociosexual behaviours such as courtship, male-male competition, aggression, and pair bonding (Fernandez-Duque et al, 2009). Both OT and VP exert central and peripheral effects and contribute to different aspects of prosociality to a large extent. Among the broad construct of prosociality, I am going to argue how the oxytocinergic and vasopressinergic neural systems are …show more content…
To a great extent that the variation in these neural systems will subsequently contribute to individual differences, yet we cannot disregard those environmental factors and empirical evidence. A majority of literature has been focusing on how OT influence prosocial behaviour, direction for future studies can be carried out on the role of VP, in particular, arginine vasopressin (AVP) is exerting greater influence on maternal behaviour as well as a healthy behavioural development of