Restoring effects of oxytocin on the attentional preference for faces in autism

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

The neuropeptide oxytocin triggers anxiolytic functions and enhances eye gaze, facial emotion recognition and neural correlates of face processing in ASD.

As a secondary question, the researchers explored the influence of social anxiety on these effects.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 29 individuals were involved.

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

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as 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 individuals 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 crossover set-up each of the individuals took both Oxytocin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

What Was Measured

As a secondary question, the researchers explored the influence of social anxiety on these effects.

The researchers tested for oxytocin's effects on attention to neutral faces as compared to houses in a sample of 29 autistic individuals and 30 control participants using a dot-probe paradigm with two different presentation times (100 or 500 ms).

PubMed files the paper under topics including Attention, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Choice Behavior, Facial Expression, Facial Recognition, Oxytocin and Phobia, Social.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

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.

The publication is from 2017 (Translational psychiatry), a journal based in United States.

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