Gender moderates the effect of oxytocin on social judgments

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

The neuropeptide oxytocin is implicated in social processing, and recent research has begun to explore how gender relates to the reported effects.

This study examined the effects of oxytocin on social affective perception and learning.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Forty-seven male and female participants made judgments of faces during two different tasks, after being randomized to either double-blinded intranasal oxytocin or placebo.

In the first task, "unseen" affective stimuli were presented in a continuous flash suppression paradigm, and participants evaluated faces paired with these stimuli on dimensions of competence, trustworthiness, and warmth.

How the Study Was Run

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

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.

In the second task, participants learned affective associations between neutral faces and affective acts through a gossip learning procedure and later made affective ratings of the faces.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Face, Judgment, Learning, Neuropsychological Tests, Oxytocin, Self Administration and Sex Characteristics.

Author keywords: affective learning, facial expression, neuropeptide, social learning and visual perception.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

Its findings take up roughly 3 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2014 (Human psychopharmacology), a journal based in England.

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