Word: prolactin
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What happens when a guy is becoming a father? The hormone testosterone is going down and the hormone prolactin is going up in the male brain, because he is smelling the pheromones of his pregnant wife. Prolactin is the hormone in females that makes breast milk. We don't know what it's doing in males yet. We assume it has something to do with making the daddy-brain circuits. By the time the baby is born, he's able to hear infant cries much better. So something about his auditory-perceptual system has actually changed. His sex drive...
...child of his is that, hormonally speaking, men are a lot more similar to women than many of us realize, particularly during the critical survival period approaching a child's birth and its infancy. As in some other mammalian species, human males are known to have high levels of prolactin (a hormone usually associated with lactating mothers) toward the end of a partner's pregnancy...
Canadian biologist Katherine Wynne-Edwards and psychologist Anne Storey have shown that the similarities don't stop there. New or expectant fathers holding either their baby or a doll wrapped in a blanket that recently held--and still smells of--a newborn experienced a rise in prolactin and cortisol (a well-known stress hormone associated with mothering) and a drop in testosterone. When the men listened to a tape of a crying newborn and were shown a videotape of a newborn struggling to nurse, the ones who reported the greatest urge to comfort the baby were the ones whose hormone...
...reach out and form synapses, necessary for new learning. Dr. Kinsley compares it to a computer acquiring extra bandwidth to help it run more than one program at a time. There has also been some intriguing recent research on the impacts of two hormones important to motherhood, oxytocin and prolactin, on mental functioning--specifically, learning and memory and the reduction of fear and anxiety...
...their fathers, while other subjects with no family history of alcoholism showed strong P3 waves. In addition, Dr. Marc Schuckit, a researcher at the San Diego Veterans Administration, has found that after several drinks some men whose fathers are alcoholics show fewer changes in the levels of two hormones, prolactin and cortisol, than men whose fathers are nonalcoholics. Eventually, such findings may provide important clues in the search for the genes involved in alcoholism...