Oxytocin and social context moderate social support seeking in women during negative memory recall

What Was Tested

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

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of oxytocin on the experience of recalling emotional autobiographical memories in two contexts-with and without social contact with an experimenter.

Why It Was Studied

Oxytocin is theorized to promote social support seeking under stress- an alternate biobehavioural response to challenge known as the tend-and-befriend response.

These effects may be context dependent, however, and no study has evaluated this effect in the presence and absence of social support.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, both men and women.

Sixty-three individuals (32 female) participated in this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, and within-subject study.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

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

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.

What Was Measured

These effects may be context dependent, however, and no study has evaluated this effect in the presence and absence of social support.

PubMed files the paper under topics including Affect, Emotions, Memory, Episodic, Mental Recall, Oxytocin, Perception and Social Behavior.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Autobiographical memory, Distress, Intranasal oxytocin, Social support and Tend-and-befriend.

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 5 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2016 (Psychoneuroendocrinology), a journal based in England.

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