Some time ago, I started my Attachment Insights series , in which I aim to provide examples of the most prevalent discussions surrounding attachment theory anddscience, together with the most accurate and up-to-date explanations.
In my sixth Attachment Insights post, I looked at the popular idea of oxytocin as the “bonding or love hormone” and explained why that story is incomplete.
A series of recent papers, several of them led by Daniel Quintana and colleagues, now positions oxytocin not as a dedicated prosocial signal but as an allostatic, energy-regulating and predictive hormone, and most recently as a hormone of behavioural flexibility.
In parallel, our own published perspective in Communications Psychology as “A narrative on the neurobiological roots of attachment-system functioning” places oxytocin mechanistically inside the attachment behavioural cycle in precisely these terms.
In this post, I would like to revisit and extend my Attachment Insights post #06 by looking at oxytocin from an attachment perspective and explaining its function as a (social) allostatic and predictive hormone. Let’s have a closer look!
The structure is as follows:
1️⃣ The Incomplete Story: Why “Bonding Hormone” Falls Short
2️⃣ From Social Salience to Allostasis
3️⃣ The Energy Dimension: Oxytocin and the Body Budget
4️⃣ The Predictive Dimension: Oxytocin, Precision, and Active Inference
5️⃣ Tend-and-Defend and Tend-and-Befriend
6️⃣ Oxytocin Inside the Attachment Cycle
7️⃣ Oxytocin as a Behavioural Flexibility Hormone, and Why That Matters for Resilience
8️⃣ An Honest Limitation
9️⃣ A short take-home message
Click on the link below to read the entire post on Substack.
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