The researchers, led by Japanese vet Takefumi Kikusui, got 30 dogs with their owners in a room for 30 minutes and watched what happened: seeing, touching, mimosas voices. And, before and after the experiment, they measured the amount of so-called love hormone, oxytocin, in the urine of both pets and their masters.
The conclusions of Kikusui, University of Azabu (Japan), are striking: the more they looked into the eyes of dogs and their owners, their brains produce more oxytocin. They then repeated the experiment with wolves bred to bottle. The hormone, a key chemical ingredient of affection we feel in our brain, not increased.
The team went further. In a third experiment, sprayed oxytocin in the snout of some dogs and again put in a room with his owner and two strangers. In the videos, you can see how some pets were frozen staring into the eyes of their owners, which in turn produce more oxytocin, in an amount correlated with their animals.
“These results support the existence of a loop self-perpetuating oxytocin in the relationship between humans and dogs, similar to the way a human mother and son way, “says team Kikusui, published their findings in the cover of the prestigious magazine scientific Science. During the process of domestication over thousands of years, dogs have evolved to mimic a behavior, the eyes of children, which caused rewards and pampering. “The soul that can speak with the eyes can also kiss with a gaze”, recited the poet Gustavo Adolfo Becquer. Kikusui says the same, but dogs and their owners.
The implications of the study are important from a medical standpoint. The results support dogs therapies for individuals with autism or PTSD two pathologies in which, in fact, being used as experimental oxytocin treatment.
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