Effect of Oxytocin on Masked Facial Expressions: an fMRI Study

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) has been shown to modulate several aspects of human social cognition. Although the exact mechanisms behind these effects remain unclear, recent research suggests that OXT modulates the perception of cues that are important for interpersonal processing, particularly emotional facial expressions. Using a backward masking procedure and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the modulatory effects of intranasal OXT on the processing of sub-liminally presented emotional faces. In a double-blind placebo-controlled between-subject pharmaco-fMRI experiment healthy volunteers received either 24IU of intranasal oxytocin or placebo 45mins before they were presented emotional (happy, angry, fearful, sad, disgusting) faces and mirror-reversed neutral faces masked by neutral faces of the same individual. To ensure attentional processing of the faces subjects were required to perform a simple gender decision task in the scanner and a recognition memory task afterwards. All subjects were additionally assessed for their state and trait anxiety and depression as well as empathy. For the analysis, we will use matlab, SPM and SPSS to conduct structural ROI analysis and two Sample t test.