Nature & Nurture #89: Dr. C. Sue Carter - Sex, Love, & Oxytocin

Dr. C. Sue Carter is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and Distinguished Research Scientist at Indiana University, where she also holds an Emerita position as Rudy Professor of Biology and was formerly Director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. She is a Fellow and past President of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society, and is known for her pioneering work on oxytocin, the love hormone, and its role in parental care and romantic pairbonding.  

In this episode we discuss how neuroendocrinology research has evolved over the course of Dr. Carter’s career, and how oxytocin became known as “the love hormone”. We discuss her early research examining oxytocin’s role in parental care, pairbonding, and sex drive in prairie voles, and contrast these findings to early evolutionary theories centered around testosterone and other sex hormones. We also talk about vasopressin, a hormone related to oxytocin, and discuss its role in more nuanced forms of care such as defensive aggression. Dr. Carter introduces the term of “sociostasis” as a social form of homeostasis which oxytocin and vasopressin are central to regulating. Lastly, we talk about oxytocin’s interactions with sex and stress hormones prenatally, during infancy, and during puberty, and how the early environment may epigenetically our oxytocin receptors and have lifelong impacts.