Intranasal oxytocin may help maintain romantic bonds by decreasing jealousy evoked by either imagined or real partner infidelity

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

While romantic jealousy may help to maintain relationships, following partner infidelity and an irretrievable loss of trust it can also promote break-ups.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were teenagers and young adults, both men and women.

Seventy heterosexual couples participated in this double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-subject design study.

Jealousy was firstly quantified in the context of subjects imagining partner infidelity and secondly in a Cyberball game where their partner interacted preferentially with an opposite-sexed rival stranger to simulate partner exclusion, or rejected a neutral stranger but not the partner.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

As a double-blind Oxytocin study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

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

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Arousal, Emotions, Interpersonal Relations, Jealousy, Oxytocin, Sexual Behavior and Sexual Partners.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Cyberball game, Intranasal oxytocin, infidelity, partner bonds and romantic jealousy.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2021 (Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England)), a journal based in United States.

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