Divergent effects of oxytocin in men and women: Increased dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activity to negative emotion displays in men but not in womenShow others and affiliations
2019 (English)Conference paper, Poster (with or without abstract) (Other academic)
Abstract [en]
The neuropeptide oxytocin plays a prominent role in social and emotional cognition. Findings suggest that intranasal oxytocin administration facilitates emotion recognition in humans, but individual and contextual differences may have moderating effects. A major caveat in this line of work is its predominant focus on young males, which limits current knowledge and generalizability across gender. To uncover potential gender effects, the present study included 32 men (mean age 45.78, sd. 22.87) and 39 women (mean 47.87, sd. 22.59). Utilizing a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subjects design, participants self-administered a single-dose of 40 IUs intranasal oxytocin 40 minutes prior to completion of a dynamic emotion recognition task in the MRI scanning. The task paradigm used positive and negative stimuli from the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayals Core Set. Preliminary analyses show that oxytocin induced dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) activity reductions during exposure to negative (relative to positive) stimuli in women, while dmPCF activity was increased under this condition in men. We observed no effect of sex in the behavioral data, however, the results show a similar trend as in brain data. We speculate that the effects of oxytocin on brain activity during emotion recognition may be related to emotion-regulatory and mentalization processes. The observed gender-differential modulatory role of oxytocin raises concern of a bias in the previous oxytocin literature on emotion recognition and associated brain activity by neglecting women in the examination. Next, we will determine the role of age effects on gender-bytreatment interactions, as well as consider modality of the emotion stimulus presentation.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2019.
Keywords [en]
oxytocin, men, women, negative emotion
National Category
Psychology
Research subject
Psychology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-178080OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-178080DiVA, id: diva2:1386529
Conference
Alpine Brain Imaging Meeting (ABIM), Champéry, Switzerland, January 6-10, 2019
2020-01-172020-01-172022-02-26Bibliographically approved