Oxytocin differentially modulates the early neural responses to faces and non-social stimuli.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci
; 19(1)2024 Feb 19.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38372627
ABSTRACT
Oxytocin (OT) alters social cognition partly through effects on the processing and appraisal of faces. It is debated whether the hormone also impacts the processing of other, non-social, visual stimuli. To this end, we conducted a randomized, counter-balanced, double-blind, placebo (PL)-controlled within-subjects' electro-encephalography (EEG) study with cismale participants (to control for gender dimorphic hormonal effects; n = 37). Participants received intranasal OT (24IU) and completed a one-back task viewing emotional (fearful/ happy) and neutral faces, and threat (snakes/spiders) and non-threat (mushrooms/flowers) non-social stimuli. OT differentially impacted event-related potentials (ERP)s to faces and non-social stimuli. For faces regardless of emotion, OT evoked greater occipital N1 and anterior P1 amplitudes at â¼155 ms than after PL, and lead to sustained differences over anterior, bilateral parietal and occipital sites from 205 ms onwards. For all non-social stimuli, OT evoked greater right parietal N1 amplitudes, and later only impacted threat stimuli over right parietal and occipital sites. None of these OT-induced modulations was related to individual anxiety levels. This pattern of results indicates that OT differentially modulates the processing of faces and non-social stimuli, and that the hormone's effect on visual processing and cognition does not occur as a function of non-clinical levels of anxiety.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Oxytocin
/
Emotions
Limits:
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci
Year:
2024
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Australia