Oxytocin enhances the triangular association among behavior, resting‐state, and task‐state functional connectivity

Abstract

Considerable advances in the role of oxytocin (OT) effect on behavior and the brain network have been made, but the effect of OT on the association between inter‐individual differences in functional connectivity (FC) and behavior is elusive. Here, by using a face‐perception task and multiple connectome‐based predictive models, we aimed to (1) determine whether OT could enhance the association among behavioral performance, resting‐state FC (rsFC), and task‐state FC (tsFC) and (2) if so, explore the role of OT in enhancing this triangular association. We found that in the OT group, the prediction performance of using rsFC or tsFC to predict task behavior was higher than that of the PL group. Additionally, the correlation coefficient between rsFC and tsFC was substantially higher in the OT group than in the PL group. The strength of these associations could be partly explained by OT altering the brain's FCs related to social cognition and face perception in both the resting and task states, mainly in brain regions such as the limbic system, prefrontal cortex, temporal poles, and temporoparietal junction. Taken together, these results provide novel evidence and a corresponding mechanism for how neuropeptides cause increased associations among inter‐individual differences across different levels (e.g., behavior and large‐scale brain networks in both resting and task‐state), and may inspire future research on the role of neuropeptides in the cross levels association of both clinical and nonclinical use.

Oxytocin reduces subjective fear in naturalistic social contexts via enhancing top-down middle cingulate-amygdala regulation and brain-wide connectivity

“…Network-level analyses that explored the effects of OT on the fine-grained level of brainwide connectivity patterns suggested that OT may broadly facilitate brain-wide exchange of information within and across networks particularly between the FPN and DMN in social fear contexts. The results align with recent findings suggesting that emotional processes such as fear and anxiety are processed in distributed networks and their interactions 27,34,97 as well as the distributed network-level properties and effects of the OT signaling system 41,98,99 . These findings underscore that OT may exert its effects on human emotion processing under complex naturalistic conditions via regulating extensive network-level interactions.…”

Social Isolation Induces Changes in the Monoaminergic Signalling in the Rat Medial Prefrontal Cortex

“…It is possible that a limitation of the study, the pooling of different parts of the mPFC, most importantly the prelimbic and infralimbic cortices masked the changes because the GABAergic systems of these otherwise adjacent brain regions differ from each other structurally and functionally [ 86 , 87 ]. In addition to the monoaminergic system, neuropeptides, e.g., oxytocin and corticotropin-releasing hormone, which we did not find to be altered in the present study, might also be involved in the control of prefrontal control of social interactions [ 88 , 89 ]. Finally, another limitation of the present study is, that only the medial prefrontal cortex was investigated while other brain regions also involved in the control of social behaviour, such as the striatum or the medial preoptic area, have not been investigated.…”