Intranasal administration of oxytocin increases compassion toward women.

Oxytocin improves compassion toward women among patients with PTSD.

Although impairments in social skills, including empathic abilities, are common in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the ability to feel compassion-a pro-social behavior that is based on empathy and drives us to help others-has never been assessed among these patients. The first aim of this study was to examine whether patients with PTSD suffer from deficits in compassion and to examine th...

Intranasal Oxytocin Lessens the Attentional Bias to Adult Negative Faces: A Double Blind within-Subject Experiment

OBJECTIVE Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that is involved in social emotional processing. A leading hypothesis is that oxytocin facilitates positive prosocial behaviors; the peptide may also play a more general role in inhibiting withdrawal-related social behaviors. The present study examined these possibilities. METHODS A double-blind, placebo controlled crossover design was used with 31 healthy...

Emotion Effects of Intranasal Oxytocin on 'Compassion Focused Imagery'

A Direct Examination of the Effect of Intranasal Administration of Oxytocin on Approach-Avoidance Motor Responses to Emotional Stimuli

Oxytocin has been shown to promote a host of social behaviors in humans but the exact mechanisms by which it exerts its effects are unspecified. One prominent theory suggests that oxytocin increases approach and decreases avoidance to social stimuli. Another dominant theory posits that oxytocin increases the salience of social stimuli. Herein, we report a direct test of these hypotheses. In a d...

Intranasal oxytocin increases fathers' observed responsiveness during play with their children: a double-blind within-subject experiment.

Recent correlational studies showed that oxytocin is associated with parenting style in humans as in other mammals. Here the first double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject experiment with intranasal oxytocin administration is presented. Subjects were 17 fathers with their toddler, observed in two play sessions of 15 min each with an intervening period of 1 week. In the oxytocin conditio...