Oxytocin intensifies the mortality salience effect: Novel evidence for the social salience model of oxytocin

Oxytocin plays an important role in human responses to threat processing. Few studies have directly examined the effects of oxytocin on our response to death-related stimuli. In the current study, 63 participants intranasally received either 32 IU of oxytocin or a placebo and thereafter completed a visual dot-probe task consisting of death-related and non-death related images. The results indicated that oxytocin enhanced participants? vigilance toward death-related images as well as increased their anxiety about and fear of death. Overall, oxytocin am-plifies the defensive responses to a mortality threat, supporting the social salience model of oxytocin.

Automated summary

The study found that oxytocin can increase human vigilance towards death-related stimuli and heighten anxiety and fear of death.