Journal
INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY
Volume 57, Issue 3, Pages 619-630Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/icb/icx091
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Funding
- USA to the Participants in the Development and Mechanisms Underlying Inter-individual Variation in Pro-social Behavior Symposium
- National Science Foundation [IOS-1634027, IDBR-0754247, DEB-1119660, DEB-1557130, DBI 0242960, 0731346]
- Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (Division of Animal Behavior)
- Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (Division of Comparative Endocrinology)
- Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (Division of Neurobiology, Neuroethology, and Sensory Biology)
- Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (Division of Ecology and Evolution)
- American Philosophical Society for fellowships
- GAANN fellowship
- GK-12 fellowship
- UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
- Universite Toulouse III Paul Sabatier
- National Geographic Society
- UCLA (Faculty Senate and the Division of Life Sciences)
- RMBL research fellowship
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [1557130] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Oxytocin has gained a reputation in popular culture as a simple love drug or cuddle hormone, yet emerging biological evidence indicates that the effects of oxytocin are complex, mediating a suite of behavioral traits that range from ultrasocial to antisocial. Here we provide a comprehensive review to assess the salience of oxytocin in the lives of free-living social mammals. We reviewed the literature to understand the potential effects of oxytocin in promoting prosocial and antisocial behaviors in non-human mammals. Our review highlights a strong bias for studies of model organisms in highly-controlled settings, and emerging evidence for oxytocin's antisocial, context-specific and sex-specific effects. We discuss the results of the review in the context of insights gained from a pilot study aimed to investigate the potential for oxytocin to promote social cohesion in free-living yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer). Our field experiment offers an example of the diverse issues that arise when conducting oxytocin manipulations in ecologically relevant contexts. Our synthesis highlights the challenges associated with acquiring adequate sample sizes for field-based, manipulative studies that require standardized measures of social behavior. Taken together, our findings lead us to join others in calling for revision of a simplistic view of oxytocin's role in regulating patterns of behavior. We draw from classical approaches used to study the mechanistic basis of behavior and offer a useful guide for disentangling these effects while appreciating the complex actions of oxytocin in shaping mammalian social behavior.
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