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Psychoanalysis has long appreciated the complicated relationship between maternal and romantic love. Researchers are now studying this very phenomenon by elucidating the psychobiology of pair-bonding. A January 2009 opinion article in Nature by the social neurobiologist Larry Young details his own work on the bonding patterns of prairie voles, a small rodent similar to the hamster, and also cites studies in humans that report findings consistent with clinical psychoanalytic observations.
Much of Young's work has focused on the hormone oxytocin. In an earlier publication (Young and Wang 2004), he reported that in the female prairie vole higher concentrations of the oxytocin receptor in the brain reward network, specifically the nucleus accumbens, correlated with stronger maternal-infant bonding. When these receptors were blocked via an oxytocin antagonist, bonding ceased. Earlier work had shown a similar correlation in adult sexual partner selection: central oxytocin infusion stimulated selection, while antagonist blockade prevented such mate-bonding. Most strikingly, when the subjects are switched from rodents to humans, fMRI studies show that mothers viewing photographs of their children activate reward system areas nearly identical to those activated in lovers viewing images of their mates. The finding that similar brain areas are activated during attachment and sexual relationships is of compelling interest to psychoanalysts.
Young suggests other ways in which this work can be extended to human relationships. For example, he cites a finding by Walum et al. (2008) that variations in the vasopressin receptor (the vasopressin system being the oxytocin pair-bonding system's analogue in the male vole) are associated with the varying propensity to monogamous behavior in humans. There appears to be an association between the activity of the vasopressin receptor gene and an estimation of marital satisfaction. However, it is important to note that all of these studies repor