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The neurobiology of attachment

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 2, pages 129–136 (2001)Cite this article

Key Points

Summary

  • Humans are a “social animal” and it is our social attachments that we live for. Recent studies have begun to reveal the common neural mechanisms that underlie specific social attachments.

  • Apart from pharmacological studies in maternal monkeys and recent imaging studies in humans, most studies have so far been done in non-primate mammals.

  • Infant–mother attachment. Studies in chick show that during imprinting — when a chick develops an enduring selectivity for following its mother — a long-term memory is formed, entailing changes in the postsynaptic structure of specific cortical regions of the brain. By contrast, rat pups develop maternal recognition through olfactory learning. At this time, no specific cortical region of the pup brain has been identified as important.

  • Maternal–infant attachment. In the rat, many of the same neuroendocrine factors — oestrogen and progesterone — that are associated with pregnancy and lactation are also critical for the onset of maternal behaviour. The neuropeptides prolactin and oxytocin also have a central role. The effects of oxtocin might be mediated through the ventral tegmental area and the medial preoptic area.

  • Olfactory learning. In sheep, selective maternal behaviour can be instigated by vaginocervical stimulation, which stimulates the release of oxytocin. Furthermore, injection of oxytocin into the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus can induce maternal acceptance of the lamb. The maternal ewe's identification of her lamb is accompanied by a robust increase in extracellular concentrations of glutamate and GABA within the olfactory bulb and a reorganization of synapses.

  • Adult–adult pair bond formation. In monogamous prairie voles, oxytocin and vasopressin seem to be necessary and sufficient for pair-bond formation. Neither peptide has a notable effect in the non-monogamous montane vole. Differences in behaviour might be due to differences in the expression patterns of the receptors for these factors. Differences in the promoter regions of these receptor genes have been implictaed in these species differences in receptor distribution and behaviour.

Abstract

It is difficult to think of any behavioural process that is more intrinsically important to us than attachment. Feeding, sleeping and locomotion are all necessary for survival, but humans are, as Baruch Spinoza famously noted, “a social animal” and it is our social attachments that we live for. Over the past decade, studies in a range of vertebrates, including humans, have begun to address the neural basis of attachment at a molecular, cellular and systems level. This review describes some of the important insights from this work.

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Figure 1: Oxytocin and maternal behaviour in the sheep brain.
Figure 2: Oxytocin and social attachment in the monogamous prairie vole female.
Figure 3: Vasopressin V1a receptor and attachment in prairie vole male.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are supported by NSF and NIMH. The authors thank M. Davis for his comments on an early draft of the manuscript and Z. Wang for his contributions to many of the ideas and results described.

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    Thomas R. Insel & Larry J. Young

  2. Emory University, Atlanta , 30329, Georgia, USA

    Thomas R. Insel & Larry J. Young

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Insel, T., Young, L. The neurobiology of attachment. Nat Rev Neurosci 2, 129–136 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35053579

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