Oxytocin increases eye-gaze towards novel social and non-social stimuli

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

The rationale of the present project was to decipher the differential role of OT in basic social cognition processes towards non-erotic attachment stimuli vs. reproduction-related stimuli in human subjects.

Why It Was Studied

Research on oxytocin (OT) has revealed a substantial involvement of this neuropeptide in social cognition processes and attachment behavior.

In a randomized double-blind repeated-measures cross-over design, N = 82 participants were investigated twice and received either intranasal OT or placebo at the first assessment followed by placebo or OT at second assessment.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 82 participants taking part.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were young adults and 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 participants were allocated by chance, so the Oxytocin group and the comparison group should start out alike.

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

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Oxytocin group a baseline to be compared against.

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

What Was Measured

In a randomized double-blind repeated-measures cross-over design, N = 82 participants were investigated twice and received either intranasal OT or placebo at the first assessment followed by placebo or OT at second assessment.

Participants were presented with standardized pictures of parent-child dyads, romantic couples engaging in non-erotic or explicit sexual activities, and non-social pictures while the researchers assessed pupil dilation and eye focus on specific pre-defined areas of interest.

The subject headings attached to it are Fixation, Ocular, Oxytocin, Social Behavior and Social Perception.

Author keywords: Eye-tracking, intranasal oxytocin, parent-child attachment, sexual stimuli and social bonding.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 82 participants.

The publication is from 2019 (Social neuroscience), a journal based in England.

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