"No regrets, just love. We can dance until we die; you and I will be young forever."

Last time, I wrote about how dopamine has kept me coming back to the dance floor, by associating dance in my brain with some of its rewards. This raises the question: what are the rewards of dancing? This is a complex topic with different answers for different people, but right now I'm interested in one factor that seems fairly common: oxytocin.



Oxytocin is one of several hormones released in small amounts during sustained close contact, as in dance. Its effects tend to build implicit trust and spur further close contact--it has been called the "love hormone." This can be illustrated by looking at the results of two experiments. The first involves prairie voles. In the wild, these small mammals mate for life, but only after spending a lot of time together. When given oxytocin before their first meeting, a male-female pair of voles will skip the "getting to know each other" stage and proceed right into wild and enthusiastic pair bonding, mating with each other continuously for a whole day and then remaining monogamous as normal. This seems to indicate that oxytocin is an important factor in building trust and familiarity through sustained contact.

The second experiment involves humans, in a less torrid setting: participants play a game in which they decide how much money to invest with another person, knowing that the other person ultimately decides how much money to give back. Those people who were given a nasal spray of oxytocin beforehand consistently invest more than the control group who were not given the hormone. When the human interaction was replaced with a computer interface, oxytocin made no difference in the amount invested. This suggests that oxytocin increases trust in humans as well. Read more about this experiment here.

Due to the low acceptability of social touch in modern American culture, dance's potential as a catalyst for romance or strong friendship is especially prominent. One of the first stumbling blocks for many new dancers is learning to be comfortable touching their partner. Often, all it takes is just doing it--take someone's hand, dance to a song, and let the oxytocin flow. As for what happens after that, well, I don't have any scientific research to share, but an informal look at the romances that have blossomed within the ballroom dance club is very suggestive. The details differ, but we may have a lot in common with those prairie voles when it comes to social bonding!