Effect of Oxytocin on Masked Facial Expressions: an fMRI Study

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Status and phase

Completed

Early Phase 1

Conditions

Facial Expressions

Treatments

Drug: Oxytocin

Drug: Placebo

Study type

Interventional

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT02183948

UESTC-SCAN-01 (Other Grant/Funding Number)

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose is to test whether oxytocin has an effect on masked facial expressions

Full description

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) has been shown to modulate several aspects of human social cognition. Although the exact mechanisms behind these effects remain unclear, recent research suggests that OXT modulates the perception of cues that are important for interpersonal processing, particularly emotional facial expressions. Using a backward masking procedure and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the modulatory effects of intranasal OXT on the processing of sub-liminally presented emotional faces. In a double-blind placebo-controlled between-subject pharmaco-fMRI experiment healthy volunteers received either 24IU of intranasal oxytocin or placebo 45mins before they were presented emotional (happy, angry, fearful, sad, disgusting) faces and mirror-reversed neutral faces masked by neutral faces of the same individual. To ensure attentional processing of the faces subjects were required to perform a simple gender decision task in the scanner and a recognition memory task afterwards. All subjects were additionally assessed for their state and trait anxiety and depression as well as empathy. For the analysis, we will use matlab, SPM and SPSS to conduct structural ROI analysis and two Sample t test.

Enrollment

86 patients

Sex

All

Ages

18 to 29 years old

Volunteers

No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Healthy subjects, no smoke or drink alcohol, coffee or other stimulants during the day before Experiment.

Exclusion criteria

history of head injury; pregnancy; uterine cavity operations were took within one year; medical or psychiatric illness; rhinitis in case they may not fully absorb the spray.