Does Oxytocin make us more sensitive to others distress? Oxytocin does not enhance attentional focus toward a suffering target
(2015) International Conference of Psychological Science — Location: Amsterdam (12.March.2015)
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- Abstract
- The neurohormone Oxytocin (OT) has been of the most studied peptides in behavioral sciences over the past two decades. Research on OT has notably shown that OT increases trust, facilitates mind reading, make people more sensitive to other’s felling, promotes altruistic behaviors, is linked with parent-infant attachment, enhances non-kin perceived trustworthiness and attractiveness and increases emotional recognition. These findings contributed to build OT’s reputation as the social hormone par excellence. Trying to understand the mechanism underlying OT’s effects, several studies have put forward a theory suggesting that OT increases the salience of social clues. As OT magnifies those clues, people on OT (versus a control group) or with a higher basal level of this hormone are more responding to those. From this consideration we formulated to following hypothesis: as OT enhances the salience of social clues, our attention should be more focused toward theses social clues to allow us to respond or interact adequately. This poster present a “real-life” experimental study that aim to check our hypothesis. Sixty-one male adults were randomly assigned either in OT or Placebo (PL) condition. We set up an ecological paradigm where participants were secretly filmed by two hidden webcams. They were asked to fill a distracting questionnaire and during this the experimenter suddenly start to show himself in distress after receiving a fake bad new by e-mail. During five minutes the experimenter displays several verbal and non verbal negative emotions like sadness, anger, desperation, frustration, … The webcams allow us to film participants’ reactions and especially, the number of gaze toward the experimenter (suffering target) and their duration. Anova’s analyses were performed to compare the two groups and no differences were found, either for the number of gaze or their duration. These puzzling results raise questions about the current theories about OT’s effects. Following these theories, participants on OT should have been more sensitive toward a suffering congener and their attention should have been more focused to it. In conclusion, our findings suggest that we have to rethink the role of OT in humans and clarify the context(s) in which a given effect can be expected.
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Lane, A., Mikolajczak, M., & Luminet, O. (2015). Does Oxytocin make us more sensitive to others distress? Oxytocin does not enhance attentional focus toward a suffering target. International Conference of Psychological Science, Amsterdam. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/185443