In this review we summarize the results and conclusions of five studies as presented in a symposium at the 42nd annual meeting of the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology, in New York in September 2012. Oxytocin administration has received increasing attention for its role in promoting positive social behavior and stress regulation, and its potential as a therapeutic intervention for addressing various aspects of psychiatric disorders. However, it has been noted that the observed effects are not uniformly beneficial. In this paper we present five new studies each concluding that contextual and interindividual factors moderate the effects of oxytocin, as well as peripheral oxytocin levels. These findings are in accordance with the recent idea that oxytocin administration may increase sensitivity to social salience cues and that the interpretation of these cues may be influenced by contextual (i.e. presence of a stranger versus friend) or interindividual factors (i.e. sex, attachment style, or the presence of psychiatric symptoms). When social cues in the environment are interpreted as "safe" oxytocin may promote prosociality but when the social cues are interpreted as "unsafe" oxytocin may promote more defensive and, in effect, "anti-social" emotions and behaviors. Likewise, oxytocin appears to promote such agonistic tendencies in individuals who are chronically pre-disposed to view the social milieu in uncertain and/or in negative terms (e.g., those with borderline personality disorder, severe attachment anxiety and/or childhood maltreatment). In all, these studies in pre-clinical animal, healthy humans and patients samples further reinforce the importance of considering both contextual and interindividual factors when trying to understand the role of oxytocin as a biological substrate underlying social bonding and stress regulatory processes and when studying the effects of oxytocin administration in particular in patients with (increased risk for) psychiatric disorders.

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Oxytocin is known to promote social affiliation. The mechanism by which this occurs is unknown, but it may involve changes in social information processing. In a placebo-controlled study, we examined the influence of intranasal oxytocin on effortful and automatic attentional shifting in 57 participants using a spatial cueing task with emotional and neutral faces. For effortful processing, oxytocin decreased the speed of shifting attention to sad faces presented for 750 ms and facilitated disengagement from right hemifield sad and angry faces presented for 200 ms. For automatic processing, symptoms of depression moderated the relationship between drug and disengagement. Oxytocin attenuated an attentional bias to masked angry faces on disengagement trials in persons with high depression scores. Oxytocin's influence on social behavior may occur, in part, by eliciting flexible attentional shifting in the early stages of information processing.

While FASD is associated with global executive impairments, executive function weaknesses are most consistent for measures of planning, fluency, and set-shifting. Neuropsychological measures assessing these executive function domains may improve differential diagnosis and treatment of FASD.