The role of oxytocin in modulating self-other distinction in human brain: a pharmacological fMRI study

Abstract

The self-other distinction is crucial in human social cognition and social interaction. Studies have found that oxytocin (OT) sharpens the self-other perceptual boundary but with mixed results. Further, little is known if the effect of OT on self-resemblance face perception exists, especially on its neural basis. Moreover, it is unclear if OT would influence the judgment in self-other discrimination when the other is a child or an adult. In the current double-blinded, placebo-controlled study, we investigated the effect of OT on self-face perception at both behavioral and neural levels. We morphed their faces with either an adult, a child, or a stranger face of either an adult or child. After being treated by either OT or placebo (PL), participants reported whether a morphed face resembles themselves while being scanned with fMRI. Behavioral results showed that people judged adult-morphed faces better than child-morphed faces. fMRI results showed that the OT group exhibited generally increased activities in the visual area and IFG for self-morphed faces. Such difference was more pronounced in the adult face compared to child face conditions. Multivariate fMRI analysis revealed that the OT group showed better classification between self-morphed versus other-morphed faces, indicating that OT increased self-other distinction, especially for adult faces and in the left hemisphere. Our study shows the significant effect of OT on self-referential brain processes, providing evidence for the potential OT's effect on a left hemisphere self network

Oxytocin modulates social brain network correlations in resting and task state

“…A single dose of 24 IU of oxytocin or placebo was administered intranasally. More details regarding drug administration have been described in one of our published studies (Wang et al, 2022;Wu, Feng, et al, 2020).…”

“…For the resting dataset, we used fMRI data similar to the resting-state data that have been published for resting-state network studies only (Wu, Liu, et al, 2020;Zheng et al, 2022;Zheng et al, 2021). For the task dataset, we used the task fMRI data that were used for task fMRI analyses only (Wang et al, 2022), which provided the task descriptions. Specifically, we used a face perception task with morphed self and other faces (Wang et al, 2022).…”

Oxytocin modulates social brain network correlations in resting and task state

“…These results indicated that OT did not influence behavioral performance in the face perception task. Further details are provided in one of our published studies (Wang et al, 2022).…”

“…A single dose of 24 IU of oxytocin or placebo was administered intranasally. More details regarding drug administration have been described in one of our published studies (Wang et al, 2022; Wu, Feng, et al, 2020). The participants then underwent a resting-state scan (300s) before the task-state scan (240s).…”

“…For the task dataset, we used the task fMRI data that were used for task fMRI analyses only (Wang et al, 2022), which provided the task descriptions. Specifically, we used a face perception task with morphed self and other faces (Wang et al, 2022). As the drug manipulation before scanning was a between-subjects design, and we collected the neural activation of each subject in both resting and task states, we had four states of fMRI dataset (OT-rest, OT-task, PL-rest, and PL-task).…”