A dose-finding study of oxytocin using neurophysiological measures of social processing

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Patients completed two social processing tasks: one electroencephalography (EEG) task, a biological motion Mu-suppression task (i.e., identifying the gender, emotion, or direction of walking of point-light animations of human movement); and one pupillometry task, pupil dilation in response to viewing affective faces.

Participants completed these tasks twice, one week apart, and were randomly administered drug or placebo intranasally 30 min prior to each session.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 47 patients taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

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

The patients were allocated by chance, so the Oxytocin group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Neither the patients nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Oxytocin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Oxytocin could be set against what happens without it.

In the crossover set-up each of the patients took both Oxytocin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Brain, Electroencephalography, Emotions, Oxytocin, Photic Stimulation, Recognition, Psychology and Schizophrenia.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 47 patients.

The publication is from 2019 (Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology), a journal based in England.

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