“I would kill for this person.” If someone we care about is in danger, most of us would do anything to protect that person, even if it means hurting another . Why can our feelings, compassion or love for someone lead us to want to do physical harm to another person? A new investigation has found the answer and again it is a matter of physics and chemistry, as Severo Ochoa said about love.
The study has been developed by scientists at the University of Buffalo in New York (USA) and reveals that this process of love to aggression has two protagonists : the hormones oxytocin (love hormone, increases human bonding) and vasopressin. (linked to sexual motivation).
The study participants completed a survey about a situation in which the person they were with, appreciated by them, had been threatened by a third party. They had to describe their own emotions in such a case and the way in which they reacted to such an event. The second part of the study included an experiment. First, saliva samples were taken to measure their hormone levels and second, they were told a story about a stranger who was in an adjoining room with another stranger. The story was designed to provoke compassion towards one of the strangers.
The two strangers would then take a math test and would be exposed to a painful stimulus to determine how the pain affected their performance . The volunteers had to decide how much pain was inflicted on each stranger. For the majority, the subject who threatened the other (for whom they had felt compassion) received much more pain stimuli in order for the first stranger to improve his test score.
Thus, ” situations in which we care about someone a lot, motivate us to do things to benefit them, but if there is someone else in the way, we can do things to harm that third party, ” explains Michael J. Poulin, co-author of the study.
The researchers found that this response can be explained by variations in the genes for both oxytocin and vasopressin receptors . “Both oxytocin and vasopressin appear to play a role that leads to increased approach behaviors and it is not surprising that both can play a crucial role in the association between compassion and aggression,” explains Poulin.
The work has been published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin .
