Abstract
We have detected coding errors in the meta-analysis of Hofmann et al. (2015) who investigated the effect of intranasal oxytocin on psychiatric symptoms. We demonstrate that, after correcting these errors and reanalysing the data, the main conclusions of Hofmann et al. (2015) are no longer supported.
Highlights
Due to converging evidence in animals and healthy human populations, oxytocin has been identified as potentially having therapeutic properties
We have detected coding errors in the meta-analysis of Hofmann et al (2015) who investigated the effect of intranasal oxytocin on psychiatric symptoms
We found several errors in this paper and, when corrected, resulted in all null results which suggests that the conclusions of Hofmann et al (2015) are incorrect
Summary
Due to converging evidence in animals and healthy human populations, oxytocin has been identified as potentially having therapeutic properties. Dadds et al (2014) reported two measures of repetitive behavior For these outcomes, the placebo group showed improvement between pre- to post-test scores, whereas symptoms increased in the INOT group. Hofmann et al (2015) included two outcomes as psychotic symptoms that exclusively measured aspects of negative symptoms in schizophrenia They coded two Brief Psychiatry Reporting Scale (BPRS) outcomes as general psychopathology. Based on the contents of the scale and other meta-analyses on this topic (Oya et al, 2016), this should have either been coded as psychotic symptoms or they should have provided rationale for divergent coding All four of these outcomes were reported as positive which, in addition to the aforementioned errors, likely inflated their meta-analytic estimates. Our fully reproducible analysis is available on OSF (https://osf.io/ kd3en/)
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