Alcohol does not influence trust in others or oxytocin, but increases positive affect and risk-taking: a randomized, controlled, within-subject trial

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

Alcohol consumption to facilitate social interaction is an important drinking motive.

Here, the researchers tested whether alcohol influences trust in others via modulation of oxytocin and/or androgens.

Who Took Part

The study group was 56 participants.

PubMed tags the participants as men only.

This randomized, controlled, within-subject, parallel group, alcohol-challenge experiment investigated the effects of alcohol (versus water, both mixed with orange juice) on perceived trustworthiness via salivary oxytocin (primary and secondary endpoint) as well as testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, positive affect, and risk-taking (additional endpoints).

The researchers compared 56 male participants in the alcohol condition (1.07 ± 0.18 per mille blood alcohol concentration) with 20 in the control condition.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized and parallel-group study.

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

The Oxytocin group and the comparison group ran side by side rather than switching.

What Was Measured

Here, the researchers tested whether alcohol influences trust in others via modulation of oxytocin and/or androgens.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Bayes Theorem, Blood Alcohol Content, Dihydrotestosterone, Ethanol, Oxytocin, Risk-Taking and Testosterone.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Positive affect, Social facilitation and Trustworthiness.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and parallel-group study of Oxytocin in 56 participants.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 6 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2024 (European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience), a journal based in Germany.

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