The long-term aim of this seed fund project focuses on the role of oxytocin in the formation and maintenance of social bonding in nonhuman primates. We are currently habituating individual rhesus monkeys living in social settings to the administration of oxytocin which will enable us to manipulate their propensity to affiliate and cooperate with conspecifics which in turn should also affect the behavior of their interaction partners towards them. Once this system has been setup it will allow us to test a number of questions related to the underlying neuroendocrine mechanisms of relationship formation, maintenance and regulation.