Acute effects of oxytocin in music performance anxiety: a crossover, randomized, placebo-controlled trial

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Oxytocin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Individuals with music performance anxiety (MPA) present physical, behavioral, and cognitive manifestations of anxiety, in addition to information processing deficits, especially in facial emotion recognition (FER).

Brazilian Clinical Trials Registry (Registro Brasileiro de Ensaios Clínicos): No.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults, men only.

Participants completed a static facial emotion recognition task and self-rated mood and performance scales.

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.

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.

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

Crossover, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial involving 43 male musicians with different levels of MPA.

Data were analyzed using ANOVA 2 × 0 for crossover trials and the Omnibus test (measure of separability between intervention and carryover effects).

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Brazil, Emotions, Facial Expression, Facial Recognition, Music, Oxytocin and Performance Anxiety.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Facial emotion, Mood and Music performance anxiety.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2020 (Psychopharmacology), a journal based in Germany.

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