Oxytocin improves mentalizing – Pronounced effects for individuals with attenuated ability to empathize

Combining oxytocin administration and positive emotion inductions: Examining social perception and analytical performance

“…Indeed, OT administration has been shown to have greater benefits for social cognition for individuals lower in social-emotional functioning and has generally been observed in male or clinical samples (e.g., Bartz et al, 2010a;Guastella et al, 2010), which may contribute to the lack of associations with the current gender-diverse and healthy sample. However, other work has recently failed to replicate this effect (Radke and de Bruijn, 2015) and our sample was reasonably well powered to detect effects of at least medium size, which have been observed in prior studies finding positive effects (e.g., Feeser et al, 2015). This suggests that this null main effect of OT administration on social perception in healthy adults may indeed be meaningful or that, if an effect does exist, it is smaller than previously suggested.…”

“…It is noteworthy that OT administration did not significantly improve social perception, given previous literature suggesting that OT administration enhances the accuracy of social perception (e.g., Bartz et al, 2010a) and performance on the RMET in particular (Domes et al, 2007;Feeser et al, 2015;Guastella et al, 2010), a task we also examined here. However, the effects of OT administration on social perception (and many other outcomes) are often highly context dependent (for review see Bartz et al, 2011;Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2012).…”

Does oxytocin affect mind-reading? A replication study

“…Other oxytocin administration studies did not elicit these broad improvements on the RMET in healthy individuals (Kuypers et al, 2014;Luminet et al, 2011;Pincus et al, 2010;Riem et al, 2014;Woolley et al, 2014) and could only partially confirm increased accuracy on difficult items after oxytocin (Woolley et al, 2014). A more pronounced impact of oxytocin on difficult mental inferences might be due to the greater challenge they present to healthy participants (Feeser et al, 2015;Kuypers et al, 2014), which fits with oxytocin-induced benefits in RMET performance specifically in less socially proficient individuals (Feeser et al, 2015;Luminet et al, 2011;Riem et al, 2014) as well as clinical populations such as autism spectrum disorder (e.g., Guastella et al, 2010). Interestingly, facilitated mental state attribution after oxytocin administration for individuals scoring high on alexithymia was further moderated by the type of material, i.e., increased accuracy was driven by negative and highly intense expressions (Luminet et al, 2011).…”

“…The observation from Domes et al (2007) that oxytocin enhances interpretation of subtle social-affective cues from the eye region, measured by the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), has only recently been fully replicated (Feeser et al, 2015) including both general effects and item difficulty as an additional modulator. Other oxytocin administration studies did not elicit these broad improvements on the RMET in healthy individuals (Kuypers et al, 2014;Luminet et al, 2011;Pincus et al, 2010;Riem et al, 2014;Woolley et al, 2014) and could only partially confirm increased accuracy on difficult items after oxytocin (Woolley et al, 2014).…”

The Social Salience Hypothesis of Oxytocin

“…Moreover, inOT has been shown to selectively improve empathic accuracy in the less socially capable individuals (19) as well as mentalizing abilities in individuals with impaired empathy (83), suggesting that OT may have a more limited role in augmenting social salience, one that perhaps preferentially benefits those with lower baseline capabilities. Along the same line, Clark-Elford et al (84) have recently shown that while OT reduces the difference between individuals with high and low social anxiety in attentional bias for emotional faces, this effect was driven by increasing the bias in the controls.…”