Oxytocin administration to parent enhances infant physiological and behavioral readiness for social engagement

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

The social milieu provides the context for the organism's survival, endurance, and adaptation.

In mammals, social participation originates within the parent-infant bond and is supported by the oxytocin (OT) system, whose functioning is transmitted from parent to child through patterns of parental care.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were infants, young adults and adults, both men and women.

Parent and infant salivary OT were assessed at multiple time points, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was measured in the three face-to-face still-face episodes, and social behaviors of the parent and child were micro-coded for indices of social engagement.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover and parallel-group.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Oxytocin group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Oxytocin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

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

Each person switched between Oxytocin and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

Utilizing a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design, 35 fathers and their 5-month-old infants were observed twice following administration of OT or placebo to father in the face-to-face still-face paradigm.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Arrhythmia, Sinus, Autonomic Nervous System, Child Development, Electrocardiography, Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay, Fathers and Infant Behavior.

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 2012 (Biological psychiatry), a journal based in United States.

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