In healthy adults for whom negative emotion is motivationally relevant, intranasal oxytocin reduced behavioral avoidance of emotionally evocative negative social stimuli versus placebo.
In plain wordsIn healthy adults prone to anxious arousal, oxytocin reduced avoidance of upsetting social images compared with placebo.
- Peptide
- Oxytocin
- Outcome
- DecreaseBehavioral avoidance of negatively-valenced social stimuli
- Study
n: not reported in source
- Comparator
- Placebo
- Outcome group
- Anxiety and mood · Mental health and mood
- Studied dose
- Dose not stated · intranasalAs given in this study (human).
Source sentences
As predicted, we found that among men and women for whom negative emotion (anxious arousal) is motivationally-relevant, intra-nasal administration of Oxytocin reduced behavioral avoidance of emotionally-evocative negatively-valenced social and non-social stimuli, but not closely matched emotionally-neutral stimuli.
1 context sentence(design, population, supporting numbers)
We report the first critical experimental test of GAAO predictions by means of a double-blind intra-nasal administration of Oxytocin vs. placebo in 90 healthy adults (N=90, 50% women).