Oxytocin Reduces Face Processing Time but Leaves Recognition Accuracy and Eye-Gaze Unaffected

Hubble, Kelly; Daughters, Katie; Manstead, Antony Stephen Reid; Rees, Aled; Thapar, Anita; Goozen, Stephanie Helena Maria Van

doi:10.1017/s1355617716000886

Cited by 35 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Specifically, the participants' information from their self-perspectives still influenced the process of adopting the views of the avatars, lending more accuracy when judging from one's own perspective than from others' perspectives. The results agree with similar results and explanations provided by other studies; i.e., Hubble et al ( 2017 ) and Di Simplicio et al ( 2009 ), who also reported a lack of effects of OXT on the accuracy in their tasks. This may indicate that the weakening effect of OXT on the egocentric bias in perspective taking may also have limitations, which indicates that self-centeredness is, to a great degree, still a default choice when accurately inferring other people's mental states.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Differential Effects of Oxytocin on Visual Perspective Taking for Men and Women

Yue

Jiang

Yue

et al. 2017

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Although oxytocin (OXT) has been shown to lead to reduced self-orientation, no study to date has directly and effectively weakened the egocentric tendencies in perspective taking tasks for both men and women. In this double-blind, placebo-controlled, mixed design study we investigated the effects of OXT on men and women in visual perspective taking tasks. The results showed that OXT shortened the differences in response time between men and women in all experimental conditions. In addition, after OXT administration, the difference in reaction time between judging from one's own perspective and judging from others' perspectives decreased in female participants; however, this effect was not present in males. This may indicate that under OXT treatment, women have a higher tendency to overcome interference from their position and mindset when judging others' perspectives. However, OXT did not affect participants' accuracy, which is possibility because the used task was not suited to detect performance improvements caused by OXT. In summary, the above results may indicate that OXT could increase perspective-taking abilities through reducing self-bias and increasing the perception of others; furthermore, this trend mainly affected women rather than men.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Differential Effects of Oxytocin on Visual Perspective Taking for Men and Women

Yue

Jiang

Yue

et al. 2017

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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“…During the waiting period, OXYTOCIN, EMPATHY AND EYE-GAZE participants completed a set of measures asking for demographics and food and caffeine intake. At the end of the waiting period they completed a 15-minute face processing task (see Hubble et al, 2016), which was followed by the empathy task that started minutes after OXT administration and lasted approximately minutes. Each video clip was followed immediately by the empathy questionnaire.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, within the ASD literature there is evidence that improved facial emotion recognition is due, in part, to participants spending more time looking at the eye area of faces (e.g., Andari et al, 2010). Nevertheless, evidence from healthy participants to support this line of argument is mixed, with one study suggesting that OXT selectively enhances gaze to the eyes (Auyeung et al 2015), another showing that OXT results in increased gaze to the eye areas for positive faces but decreased gaze to the eyes for negative faces (Domes, Steiner, Porges & Heinrichs, 2013), and others suggesting that improvements in facial emotion recognition are unaffected by eye-gaze (Hubble et al, 2016;Lischke et al, 2012;), but instead are related to pupil dilation (Prehn et al, 2013).…”

Section: Oxytocin Empathy and Eye-gazementioning

confidence: 99%

Oxytocin increases attention to the eyes and selectively enhances self-reported affective empathy for fear

et al. 2017

Self Cite

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Oxytocin (OXT) has previously been implicated in a range of prosocial behaviors such as trust and emotion recognition. Nevertheless, recent studies have questioned the evidence for this link. In addition, there has been relatively little conclusive research on the effect of OXT on empathic ability and such studies as there are have not examined the mechanisms through which OXT might affect empathy, or whether OXT selectively facilitates empathy for specific emotions. In the current study, we used eye-tracking to assess attention to socially relevant information while participants viewed dynamic, empathy-inducing video clips, in which protagonists expressed sadness, happiness, pain or fear. In a double-blind, within-subjects, randomized control trial, 40 healthy male participants received 24 IU intranasal OXT or placebo in two identical experimental sessions, separated by a 2-week interval. OXT led to an increase in time spent fixating upon the eye-region of the protagonist's face across emotions. OXT also selectively enhanced self-reported affective empathy for fear, but did not affect cognitive or affective empathy for other emotions. Nevertheless, there was no positive relationship between eye-gaze patterns and affective empathy, suggesting that although OXT influences eye-gaze and may enhance affective empathy for fear, these two systems are independent. Future studies need to further examine the effect of OXT on eye-gaze to fully ascertain whether this can explain the improvements in emotional behavior.

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“…Five studies investigated the effects of a single dose of intranasal oxytocin on attention towards regions of interest (ROIs) in threatening images using eye tracking (Table 1). Three of the studies defined the ROIs as the eye and mouth region of angry and disgusted faces (Bertsch et al, 2013;Domes et al, 2013;Hubble et al, 2017;Lischke et al, 2012a). One study investigated fixation towards predefined regions of interest in threatening scenes taken from the international picture affective system (Lischke et al, 2012b).…”

Section: Attentional Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%