Washington: Absence does make the heart grow fonder. This is the outcome of new research that found that the level of the "love" hormone oxytocin increases when people come home after a tiring day at work.

Anthropologists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, also found that the increase in oxytocin was greater for those men who were absent longer, and it positively correlated with changes in testosterone."Our goal was to look at the interaction between different hormones in motivating behaviour in a naturalistic context," said Adrian Jaeggi, the paper's co-lead author and a post-doctoral scholar.