Oxytocin increases eye-gaze towards novel social and non-social stimuli

ABSTRACT

Research on oxytocin (OT) has revealed a substantial involvement of this neuropeptide in social cognition processes and attachment behavior.

The rationale of the present project was to decipher the differential role of OT in basic social cognition processes towards non-erotic attachment stimuli vs. reproduction-related stimuli in human subjects.

In a randomized double-blind repeated-measures cross-over design, N = 82 participants were investigated twice and received either intranasal OT or placebo at the first assessment followed by placebo or OT at second assessment. Participants were presented with standardized pictures of parent-child dyads, romantic couples engaging in non-erotic or explicit sexual activities, and non-social pictures while we assessed pupil dilation and eye focus on specific pre-defined areas of interest. Multilevel analyses suggest that during the initial presentation, OT increased pupil dilation towards all categories of stimuli and led the eye focus towards the eyes and body regions, followed by a strong decrease in pupil dilation and fixations at the second session.

These carry-over effects indicate that hormonal treatment at an initial contact to social stimuli can determine how these stimuli are processed later. These results might have implications for OT as a treatment in interventions with repeated exposure to social material.

KEYWORDS:

• Eye-tracking
• social bonding
• social perception
• sexual stimuli
• parent-child attachment
• intranasal oxytocin

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge A. Isler, S. Joehl, D. Schneider, M. Prevost and I. Gold for their skilled support in running the study. The authors wish to thank S. Dubber for proofreading the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary data can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health [ORIP/OD P51OD011132,P50MH100023];Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) Venture Grant;Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [SNF 105314 124627].