Kinetics and Dose Dependency of Intranasal Oxytocin Effects on Amygdala Reactivity

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

Current neuroimaging perspectives on a variety of mental disorders emphasize dysfunction of the amygdala.

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT), a key mediator in the regulation of social cognition and behavior, accumulates in cerebrospinal fluid after intranasal administration in macaques and humans and modulates amygdala reactivity in both species.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 116 men were involved.

PubMed indexes the participants as young adults and adults, men only.

To address this highly relevant issue, a total of 116 healthy men underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging using a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study design.

During functional magnetic resonance imaging, subjects completed an emotional face recognition task including stimuli with varying intensities ranging from low (highly ambiguous) to high (less ambiguous).

How the Study Was Run

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

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Oxytocin and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

As a double-blind Oxytocin study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

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.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Amygdala, Brain Mapping, Emotions, Facial Recognition, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Oxytocin and Psychotropic Drugs.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Autistic-like traits, Emotion recognition and fMRI.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 116 men.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

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

More context: the Oxytocin compound page.