14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers writing in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology say that those who appear to be immune to the so-called love hormone are likely to also be easier to hypnotize.
The love hormone these scientists are talking about is known as oxytocin, and its purpose is that of making it easier for people to bond with each other and form strong relationships.
However, it appears that, because of genetic variations, people have different receptors for said love hormone. Because of this, some are able to connect with others within a rather limited time frame, and others more often than not lean towards social detachment. Nature informs us that the latter category of people are the ones the researchers now label as being easier to hypnotize.
As the specialists who pieced together this study explain, it is precisely their being socially detached that allows them to turn towards their own internal world and experiment distortions of reality as a result of hypnosis.
“Absorption in internal experience is one key component of the hypnotic response,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
“The neuropeptide oxytocin has been posited to heighten sensitivity to external cues, and it is possible that individual differences in oxytocin-related capacity to engage in external or internal experiences influences hypnotic response,” they further explained.
In order to test these assumptions, the researchers asked a total of 185 volunteers to use audio recordings in order to hypnotize themselves.
Later on, they checked to see how deep the hypnosis of these individuals was.
The researchers also made the volunteers carry out several tests meant to determine how easy it was for them to cut their ties with the external world and focus solely on their imagination.
Lastly, the specialists determined which variants of the oxytocin receptor genes each of the participants to the study had.
By the looks of it, the oxytocin receptors that the volunteers had did in fact influence their ability of allowing themselves to be hypnotized.
“These findings provide initial evidence that the capacity to respond to suggestions for altered internal experience is influenced by the oxytocin receptor gene, and is consistent with evidence that oxytocin plays an important role in modulating the extent to which people engage with external versus internal experiences,” the researchers concluded.