The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
It turns out that oxytocin is not only released in the nucleus accumbens, it's released in the home of the dopamine neurons in the VTA. So, my lab and another lab from Northwestern showed that oxytocin can actually modulate dopamine neuron activity in the ventral tegmental area.
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Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
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And what we found was that oxytocin action in the nucleus accumbens was indeed important for promoting sociability, probably for promoting the reinforcing component of a social interaction.
So this paper reported that when serotonin is released in the hypothalamus, it activates and causes the release of oxytocin that's in the hypothalamus.
where we were looking in the accumbens, it was the opposite. Oxytocin caused the release of serotonin.