Journal
PSYCHONEUROENDOCRINOLOGY
Volume 81, Issue -, Pages 105-112Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2017.04.005
Keywords
Anxiety sensitivity; Approach-avoidance; Emotion; Motivation; Oxytocin; Social
Categories
Funding
- Israel Science Foundation
- University of Haifa President's Doctoral Fellowship Program
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Re-examining decades of the social construal of Oxytocin, the General Approach -Avoidance Hypothesis of Oxytocin (GAAO) predicts that Oxytocin will modulate responding to emotionally -evocative and personally relevant social and non-social stimuli due to its action on the neural substrate of approach and avoidance motivation. We report the first critical experimental test of GAAO predictions by means of a double-blind intranasal administration of Oxytocin vs. placebo in 90 healthy adults (N = 90, 50% women). As predicted, we found that among men and women for whom negative emotion (anxious arousal) is motivationally -relevant, intranasal administration of Oxytocin reduced behavioral avoidance of emotionally -evocative negatively-valenced social and non-social stimuli, but not closely matched emotionally -neutral stimuli. Findings cannot be explained by extant social theories of Oxytocin. We discuss the implications of the present findings for basic and translational clinical Oxytocin research.
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