Protocol for an experimental investigation of the roles of oxytocin and social support in neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, and subjective responses to stress across age and gender

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

Experimental research will be used to determine whether exogenously administered oxytocin (intranasal) influences psychological and physiological outcomes under conditions of stress across gender and age in adulthood.

Why It Was Studied

Oxytocin is a neurohypophyseal hormone hypothesized to coordinate both the causes and effects of positive social interactions, and may be involved in positive physiological adaptations such as buffering the deleterious effects of stress and promoting resilience.

The proposed research will examine whether and how oxytocin influences responses to stress in humans and will consider effects in relation to those of social support.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, both men and women.

Hypotheses to be tested are: 1) Oxytocin ameliorates the deleterious neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, and subjective effects of stress; 2) Oxytocin and social support have similar and additive stress-buffering effects; 3) Oxytocin effects are stronger in women versus men; and 4) Oxytocin effects are similar across a range of adult ages.

Hypotheses will be tested with a placebo-controlled, double-blind study using a sample of healthy men and women recruited from the community.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Oxytocin and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Oxytocin.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Oxytocin group a baseline to be compared against.

Participants are randomly assigned to receive either oxytocin or placebo.

They undergo a social stress manipulation with and without social support (randomly assigned), and outcome measures are obtained at multiple times during the procedure.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Age Distribution, Aging, Cardiovascular Physiological Phenomena, Neurosecretory Systems, Oxytocin, Sex Distribution and Social Support.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2009 (BMC public health), a journal based in England.

More context: the Oxytocin compound page, all human trials.