Intranasal oxytocin and the stress-buffering effects of social support during experimentally induced pain: The role of attachment security

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

Future studies are needed to determine sex differences in how oxytocin shapes stress-buffering effects of support.

Why It Was Studied

This study examined whether intranasal oxytocin enhances the stress-buffering effects of social support during experimentally induced pain, taking into account the role of individual differences in attachment security.

Only female participants were examined.

Who Took Part

PubMed tags the participants as both men and women.

Participants underwent the Cold Pressor Task (CPT) and were monitored for heart rate variability (HRV: RMSSD) and heart rate and reported pain levels.

The Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire was used to measure attachment.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled 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.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Oxytocin, Pain and Social Support.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Attachment, Cold pressor task and Heart rate variability.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2021 (Journal of affective disorders), a journal based in Netherlands.

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