THE trust hormone, it seems, is also the mind-reading hormone. A sniff of oxytocin, which underpins social attachment among animals, also turns out to improve men’s ability to read other people’s emotions.
Two years ago, researchers reported that oxytocin increases trust (Â鶹´«Ã½, 4 June 2005, p 7). Now a team led by Gregor Domes at Rostock University in Germany has investigated one of the basic components of trust: emotional recognition.
The researchers sprayed oxytocin up the noses of 30 men and tested how well they could read the emotions conveyed by photographs of eyes taken in real-life situations.…
