Hormones used to cure fear of migrants?

A group of researchers from Germany and the United States claims to have found at least a partial cure for xenophobia, a much heralded accomplishment in the wake of a historic migrant crisis that has swept more than 1.7 million Muslim refugees from the Middle East and Africa into Europe's cities and led to fissures in social cohesion that some predict have sewn the seeds of civil war.

According to the researchers, the hormone drug oxytocin administered in combination with peer influence caused people inclined to have "negative attitudes" toward migrants to actually want to reach out and help them.

"Researchers have shown in a new study that the bonding hormone oxytocin together with social norms significantly increases the willingness to donate money to refugees in need, even in people who tend to have a skeptical attitude towards migrants," the study concluded.

The experiment was carried out on three test groups by researchers at the University of Bonn Medical Center in cooperation with the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the University of Lübeck in northern Germany. The researchers conducted three experiments in which they tested a total of 183 subjects, who were all German natives. The subjects were asked to read about the needs of real-life refugee families and decide whether to donate money to them or to native German families with needs.

Science Daily reports on the study in its August issue.

For the half of the participants who received oxytocin, "The result was astounding," the periodical states.

Science Daily spoke with Nina Marsh, one of the medical researchers who worked on the study.

"Now, even people with negative attitudes towards migrants donated up to 74 percent more to refugees than in the previous round," Marsh said.

"Through the combined administration of oxytocin with a social norm [peer influence], the donations for refugees in those skeptical towards migrants nearly reached half of the sums donated by the group which showed a positive attitude towards refugees."

Read the entire study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study was not well received among conservatives in the United States, whether inside or outside the medical community.

Dr. Andrew Bostom said the study amounted to junk science and "should never have received IRB approval."

An institutional review board (IRB), also known as an independent ethics committee, ethical review board or research ethics board, is a type of committee used in research that has been formally designated to approve, monitor, and review biomedical and behavioral research.

"Leave it to the Germans, the first thing that came to mind when I read this news was the medical experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele and his 'work' at concentration camps like Auschwitz to create a 'better' society comprised of people he deemed to be quality people," said Ann Corcoran, who blogs at Refugee Resettlement Watch and is critical of United Nations-backed resettlements in U.S. cities.

"It is creepy," she said. "Will the Germans demand their citizens get their daily dose of oxytocin?"

James Simpson, a journalist who has also written extensively about the dark side of refugee resettlement, was taken aback by the study.

"This reveals a deeply entrenched official agenda to push refugee resettlement at all costs and thoroughly discredit any and all opposition to it," Simpson told WND. "It reinforces my belief that official Germany is carrying out the Russian plan to take over Western Europe using the refugee crisis to create chaos. Chancellor Angela Merkel is the Russians' agent-in-place – a member of the East German Communist Party before coming to the West who inserted herself into West German politics by pretending to be a pro-West moderate leader."

Simpson reminded WND of the old Soviet KGB methods of controlling the Russian population. Under the Communist Party, "refusniks" who failed to submit to the party's dictates were considered one of two types of people – they were either jailed as prisoners of conscience or institutionalized as mental patients.

Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the German study during his radio show Wednesday.

“A group of researchers from Germany and the United States have published a study which concludes that doping ‘xenophobic’ populations with massive quantities of Oxytocin," he said. "Do you know what oxytocin is? It’s not a narcotic. … It’s a hormone, and it’s laced with estrogen. Estrogen-linked hormone, oxytocin, will cure nationalism."

WND Managing Editor David Kupelian

David Kupelian, vice president and managing editor of WND and author of the recent book "The Snapping of the American Mind," pointed out that psychiatry has long been a key component of far-left political movements the world over.

"The left politicized the science of psychiatry, and the top levels of the social sciences are all dominated by the far left, whether it be the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, or whatever; they are all dominated by the left, and that's why they came out and de-pathologized gender identity disorder in 2013. They did it despite there being a 41 percent suicide rate, cutting off healthy body parts, etc."

Some left-leaning researchers have even postulated that conservatives suffer from an enlarged amygdala section of the brain, resulting in an extreme inability to cope with social change.

When psychiatry no longer has purely scientific standards, he said, it can become weaponized in the hands of the state.

"That's how they use labels today; 'you're homophobic,' 'you're transphobic,' 'you're Islamophobic,' they are all pathologizing labels," he said. "The irony is, there are decades of research on this, showing conservatives are happier people then liberals and the left."

In "Snapping," Kupelian bares this history once and for all.

"Welcome to the history of the Far Left, wherein those who through monumental deceit have conspired to transform Judeo-Christian America, upend her Constitution, and impose an alien new system of governance and morality upon her, have the audacity to accuse the traditionally minded American middle class, which just wants its country back, of being ignorant, deranged and dangerous," he writes.

"For decades the left – which throughout the 1900s gave the world its bloodiest century in history – has been busy denouncing and 'diagnosing' conservatives and Christians. In the Soviet Union this practice was integral to the ongoing operation of the communist state. Dissidents – the sanest and most courageous people in the country – were confined to psychiatric hospitals for 'treatment.' If you had a problem with communism you were mentally ill and diagnosed with made-up conditions like 'philosophical intoxication' and 'sluggish schizophrenia.'"