Null results of oxytocin and vasopressin administration across a range of social cognitive and behavioral paradigms: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin and Vasopressin.

Research examining oxytocin and vasopressin in humans has the potential to elucidate neurobiological mechanisms underlying human sociality that have been previously unknown or not well characterized.

However, years of research highlighting wide-ranging effects of, in particular, intranasal oxytocin administration have been tempered as the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and other disciplines have been addressing concerns over the reproducibility and validity of research findings.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as teenagers, young adults and adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Oxytocin.

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

What Was Measured

The researchers present a series of behavioral tasks that were conducted using a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled, between-subjects design, in which their research group found no main effects of oxytocin and vasopressin on a host of social outcomes.

PubMed files the paper under topics including Bayes Theorem, Cognition, Negative Results, Oxytocin, Placebo Effect, Reproducibility of Results and Social Behavior.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Social cognition, Social processes and Vasopressin.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

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

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