The effects of Cognitive Bias Modification training and oxytocin administration on trust in maternal support: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

Lack of trust in parental support is a transdiagnostic risk factor for the development of psychological problems throughout the lifespan.

Trust-related CBM training effects could possibly be enhanced by oxytocin, a neuropeptide that has been proposed to play an important role in social information processing and social relationships.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were children, both men and women.

One hundred children (aged 8-12 years) are randomly assigned to one of four intervention conditions.

Participants inhale a nasal spray that either contains oxytocin (OT) or a placebo.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled 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 participants 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.

Additionally, they receive either a CBM training aimed at positively modifying trust-related information processing bias or a neutral placebo training aimed to have no trust-related effects.

Main and interaction effects of the interventions are assessed on three levels of trust-related outcome measures: trust-related interpretation bias; self-reported trust; and mother-child interactional behavior.

Importantly, side-effects of a single administration of OT in middle childhood are monitored closely to provide further information on the safety of OT administration in this age group.

What Was Measured

The present article describes the study protocol for a double-blind randomized controlled trial (RCT) aimed at testing the individual and combined effects of CBM training and oxytocin administration on trust in maternal support.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Age Factors, Belgium, Child Behavior, Clinical Protocols, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Maternal Behavior and Mother-Child Relations.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Attachment, Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM), Interpretation bias, Middle childhood, Oxytocin and Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT).

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

The publication is from 2017 (Trials), a journal based in England.

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