Oxytocin modulates hemodynamic responses to monetary incentives in humans

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

The researchers examined the effects of oxytocin administration on reward circuit function in 18 healthy men as they performed a monetary incentive task.

Why It Was Studied

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide widely recognized for its role in regulating social and reproductive behavior.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 18 men taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are young adults and adults, men only.

How the Study Was Run

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

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 men 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.

The blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging in the context of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover trial of intranasal oxytocin.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Analysis of Variance, Emotions, Hemodynamics, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Mesencephalon, Motivation and Nucleus Accumbens.

The authors tagged it with the keywords FMRI, Oxytocin and Reward.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 18 men.

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.

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2016 (Psychopharmacology), a journal based in Germany.

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