Oxytocin promotes protective behavior in depressed mothers: a pilot study with the enthusiastic stranger paradigm

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Successful parenting requires maternal behaviors that promote infant survival such as protection from predators.

In animal studies, oxytocin (OT) has been linked to maternal aggression to protect offspring.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults, women only.

Sixteen mothers with a diagnosis of PND participated in a double-blind, randomized-controlled, within-subject pilot study.

Participants received intranasal OT during one visit and placebo spray on the alternate visit.

How the Study Was Run

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

Because people in this Oxytocin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

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.

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger Oxytocin study would be practical.

Maternal protective behavior toward their infant was measured, in the presence of a socially intrusive stranger.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Depression, Postpartum, Maternal Behavior, Oxytocics, Oxytocin, Parenting and Pilot Projects.

The authors tagged it with the keywords maternal behaviour.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2015 (Depression and anxiety), a journal based in United States.

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