The impact of intranasal oxytocin on attention to social emotional stimuli in patients with anorexia nervosa: a double blind within-subject cross-over experiment

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Oxytocin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Social factors may be of importance causally and act as maintenance factors in patients with anorexia nervosa.

This study aimed to examine the impact of oxytocin on attentional processes to social faces representing anger, disgust, and happiness in patients with anorexia nervosa.

Who Took Part

The study group was 64 subjects.

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

A double-blind, placebo-controlled within-subject crossover design was used.

Intranasal oxytocin or placebo followed by a visual probe detection task with faces depicting anger, disgust, and happiness was administered to 64 female subjects: 31 patients with anorexia nervosa and 33 control students.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover 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 subjects and researchers unaware of who received Oxytocin.

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.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Anorexia Nervosa, Attention, Case-Control Studies, Emotions, Neurotransmitter Agents and Oxytocin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 64 subjects.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 7 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2014 (PloS one), a journal based in United States.

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