Love can lead to war, according to a new study on human psychology.

While empathy is meant to promote gentle emotions and nurturing behaviors, compassionate feelings can also trigger aggressive behaviors, according to researchers.

Researchers explain that two neurohormones, chemicals that act as hormones in the bloodstream and neurotransmitters in the brain, seem to be partly responsible for the counterintuitive response.

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"Both oxytocin and vasopressin seem to serve a function leading to increased 'approach behaviors,'" Poulin, associate professor of psychology from the University at Buffalo, said in a news release. "People are motivated by social approach or getting closer to others."

Participants in the latest study were asked to complete surveys that asked them answer questions about someone they love, and how that person was threatened by a third-party. Afterwards, participants provided saliva samples for researchers to measure neurohormone levels and asked to listen to a compassion-evoking story about someone they never met, a fictional participant who was supposedly in another room with a second fictional participant.  

Participants were then told that the pair in the other room would be exposed to hot sauce, a painful but harmless stimulus, for researchers to measure the effects of physical pain on performance. Participants were then asked to choose how much of a painful stimulus they would provide to the third party who was competing with the person they were primed to have compassion toward.

"The results of both the survey and the experiment indicate that the feelings we have when other people are in need, what we broadly call empathic concern or compassion, can predict aggression on behalf of those in need," said Poulin. "In situations where we care about someone very much, as humans, we were motivated to benefit them, but if there is someone else in the way, we may do things to harm that third party."

The study, "Empathy, Target Distress and Neurohormone Genes Interact to Predict Aggression for Others - Even Without Provocation," with Anneke E.K. Buffone, a graduate student in the UB Department of Psychology, was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.