Intranasal oxytocin impedes the ability to ignore task-irrelevant facial expressions of sadness in students with depressive symptoms

Cognition as a target in major depression: New developments

“…Apart from that, in a study carried out with a sample of university students with high levels of depressive symptoms which did not meet MDD criteria, the authors found that, those patients on OT presented more difficulties to inhibit the processing of sad faces in a negative affective priming (NAP) task (Ellenbogen et al, 2013). This was an unexpected finding for the authors since no global effect on inhibition has been proved concerning OT administration.…”

“…and in promoting prosocial behaviors (Ellenbogen et al, 2013). Despite many questions still remains to be answered about how intranasal oxytocin (OT) acts, in recent years an increased interest on OT and its impact on the treatment of several clinical populations has emerged (e.g.…”

The influence of Oxytocin on automatic motor simulation

“…In particular, researchers have found improvement in perceiving social stimuli and increased empathy after OT administration (Domes et al, 2007b;Kéri and Benedek, 2009;Hurlemann et al, 2010;Marsh et al, 2010;Perry et al, 2010). Furthermore, when OT levels are increased, people seem to become more altruistic, trusting, and generous (Kosfeld et al, 2005;Baumgartner et al, 2008), possibly due to a reduction of anxiety (MeyerLindenberg et al, 2011;Viviani et al, 2011) and/or altering social information processing (Ellenbogen et al, 2012(Ellenbogen et al, , 2013. Grillon et al (2013), however, have shown that OT increases anxiety to unpredictable situations, suggesting that the response of OT is dependent upon the familiarity of the situation.…”

Effects of Intranasal Oxytocin on Steroid Hormones in Men and Women

“…Steroid hormones participate in many of the emotional and social behaviors of interest to psychologists studying oxytocin, including stress response [17,18,19], processing of emotional stimuli [20,21,22,23,24,25], dominance and aggression [26,27,28,29], and pro-social behaviors such as trust and empathy [30,31,32]. For example, several studies have investigated the effects of acute intranasal oxytocin on attention to, memory for, and the ability to recognize emotional facial expressions [33,34,35,36,37]. Interestingly, the acute administration of testosterone or cortisol has also been shown to impact the processing of emotional face stimuli [24,38,39].…”

“…We addressed this need by measuring steroid hormones in saliva samples collected repeatedly before and after the acute administration of intranasal oxytocin or placebo. We chose a dose of oxytocin that is most commonly used in the literature and has been associated with changes in trust [47], stress responses [54,56], emotional processing [34,35], and other behavioral and physiological measures in humans. Discovering the effects of oxytocin on steroid hormones in humans will not only address the gaps in the literature discussed above and elucidate the effects of oxytocin on peripheral physiology, but may also be useful for understanding many of the interesting and complicated effects of oxytocin on human social behavior.…”