An Oxytocin-Induced Facilitation of Neural and Emotional Responses to Social Touch Correlates Inversely with Autism Traits

Abstract

Social communication through touch and mutual grooming can convey highly salient socio-emotional signals and has been shown to involve the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) in several species. Less is known about the modulatory influence of OXT on the neural and emotional responses to human interpersonal touch. The present randomized placebo (PLC)-controlled within-subject pharmacofunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was designed to test the hypothesis that a single intranasal dose of synthetic OXT (24 IU) would facilitate both neural and emotional responses to interpersonal touch in a context-(female vs male touch) and trait-(autistic trait load) specific manner. Specifically, the experimental rationale was to manipulate the reward value of interpersonal touch independent of the intensity and type of actual cutaneous stimulation administered. Thus, 40 heterosexual males believed that they were touched by either a man or a woman, although in fact an identical pattern of touch was always given by the same female experimenter blind to condition type. Our results show that OXT increased the perceived pleasantness of female, but not male touch, and associated neural responses in insula, precuneus, orbitofrontal, and pregenual anterior cingulate cortex. Moreover, the behavioral and neural effects of OXT were negatively correlated with autistic-like traits. Taken together, this is the first study to show that the perceived hedonic value of human heterosexual interpersonal touch is facilitated by OXT in men, but that its behavioral and neural effects in this context are blunted in individuals with autistic traits.

Hormonal contraceptives suppress oxytocin-induced brain reward responses to the partner’s face

“…In this study, OXT also increased activations in the bilateral precuneus across all stimulus types in both groups of women. Given that the precuneus is heavily implicated in mediating interoceptive awareness and consciousness (Lou et al, 2004), this finding resonates well with our hypothesis that OXT induces a self-referential processing bias (Scheele et al, 2014a;Hurlemann and Scheele, 2016), thus increasing the conscious perception of partner value.…”

Oxytocin Facilitates Pavlovian Fear Learning in Males

“…This response is not surprising owing to previous findings showing that the ACC has a crucial role within a general neural fear circuit (Hariri et al, 2003) as well as within the framework of Pavlovian fear conditioning (see reviews by Milad et al, 2007;Sehlmeyer et al, 2009). Furthermore, OXT has been found to moderate ACC activity (Gorka et al, 2015;Scheele et al, 2014a), and the ACC is characterized by a high OXT receptor density (Boccia et al, 2013). More specifically, activation in this study was found in the subgenual ACC, which is especially involved in fear responses and shows abnormal activity in mood disorders (Drevets et al, 2008).…”

“…Based on previous studies investigating the neural effects of OXT (Eckstein et al, 2014a;Scheele et al, 2014a), we defined regions of interest (ROIs) for the amygdala (Hurlemann et al, 2008) and subdivisions of the cingulate cortex (ie, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the middle cingulate cortex (MCC)) (Vogt, 2005) by applying atlas-based structural ROI masks. A significance threshold of Po0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons (family-wise error (FWE)), was used.…”

“…We expected this to be evident in psychophysiology as well as in fear-related neural networks (Sehlmeyer et al, 2009). These networks include the amygdala as well as middle and anterior parts of the cingulate cortex, which are involved in negative affect (Vogt, 2005) and whose activations have been found to be susceptible to OXT IN (Eckstein et al, 2014a, b;Preckel et al, 2014;Scheele et al, 2014a, b).…”

Opposing Oxytocin Effects on Intergroup Cooperative Behavior in Intuitive and Reflective Minds

“…It has been shown that the effects of oxytocin varied as a function of personal condition (such as psychopathology, personality trait, attachment style; Bartz et al, 2011a, b;Scheele et al, 2014). For example, the effect of oxytocin was discrepant in borderline personality disorder patients and healthy controls, as oxytocin decreased (rather than increased) trust and cooperation in patients (Bartz et al, 2011b).…”