Intranasal oxytocin and the neural correlates of infant face processing in non-parent women

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

Here the researchers employed a randomized, double-blind, and within-subject crossover study of 24 non-parent women to examine the impact of intranasal oxytocin administration, relative to placebo, on processing infant and adult faces.

Why It Was Studied

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been widely employed to identify different stages of face processing, with recent research probing the neural dynamics of adult's processing of infant faces.

Infant faces represent a salient category of visual stimuli, especially in parents, likely prioritized for processing through activity of the oxytocinergic system.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were infants and adults, women only.

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 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.

Each person switched between Oxytocin and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Attention, Cues, Evoked Potentials, Facial Recognition, Oxytocics and Oxytocin.

The authors tagged it with the keywords EEG/ERP, Face processing, Infant and Intranasal oxytocin.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

The publication is from 2017 (Biological psychology), a journal based in Netherlands.

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