Oxytocin administration enhances controlled social cognition in patients with schizophrenia

What Was Tested

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

The neuropeptide oxytocin has multiple prosocial effects when administered intranasally in humans and there is growing interest in its therapeutic potential in schizophrenia.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 29 subjects were involved.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults and middle-aged adults, men only.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

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

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Oxytocin could be set against what happens without it.

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

Social cognition was assessed with The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET).

The researchers examined the effects of oxytocin administration on automatic social cognition (the ability to rapidly interpret and understand emotional cues from the voice, face, and body); controlled social cognition (the ability to comprehend indirectly expressed emotions, thoughts, and intentions through complex deliberations over longer time periods); and a control task (the ability to comprehend truthful dialog and perform general task procedures) in individuals with and without schizophrenia using mixed factorial analysis of variance models.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Awareness, Cognition, Neuropsychological Tests, Oxytocin, Schizophrenia, Schizophrenic Psychology and Social Behavior.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Social cognition.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 29 subjects.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Its findings take up roughly 5 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 (Psychoneuroendocrinology), a journal based in England.

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