Abstract
One of the most robust effects of intranasal oxytocin treatment is its enhancement of emotional empathy responses across cultures to individuals displaying emotions in realistic contexts in the Multifaceted Empathy Task (MET). However, it is not established if this effect of oxytocin on emotional empathy is due to altered visual attention toward different components of the stimulus pictures or an enhanced empathic response. In the current randomized placebo-controlled within-subject experiment on 40 healthy male individuals, we both attempted a further replication of emotional empathy enhancement by intranasal oxytocin (24 IU) and used eye-tracking measures to determine if this was associated by altered visual attention toward different components of the picture stimuli (background context, human face, and body posture). Results replicated previous findings of enhanced emotional empathy in response to both negative and positive stimuli and that this was associated with an increased proportion of time viewing the faces of humans in the pictures and a corresponding decrease in that toward the rest of the body and/or background context. Overall, our findings suggest that enhanced emotional empathy following oxytocin administration is due to increased attention to the faces of others displaying emotions and away from other contextual and social cues.Clinical Trial Registration: www.ClinicalTrials.gov Oxytocin Modulates Eye Gaze Behavior During Social Processing; registration ID: NCT03293511; URL: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03293511.
Highlights
Empathizing with others is of key importance for our social interactions
Another study using dynamic, empathy-inducing video clips reported that OT enhanced emotional but not cognitive empathy for fear (Hubble et al, 2017a), and several studies have reported that OT can increase empathy for pain experienced by others in both sexes (Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2013; Abu-Akel et al, 2015)
Based on the previous studies reporting that OT facilitated facial emotion recognition and eye gaze toward facial stimuli, we hypothesized that the OT-induced facilitation of emotional empathy would be associated with increased gaze time toward the face and away from other less socially salient features of both positive and negative valence picture stimuli
Summary
Empathizing with others is of key importance for our social interactions. Impairments in this domain represent a major symptom in several psychiatric disorders such as autism (Lombardo et al, 2007) and depression (Tully et al, 2016; Xu et al, 2020), leading to significant problems in understanding and responding appropriately to others in social contexts. In the context of visual stimuli-evoked empathic responses, only one previous study has directly investigated the effects of intranasal OT and reported that OT increased eye gaze across dynamic expressions of sadness, happiness, pain, or fear (Hubble et al, 2017a), and empathic empathy for fearful faces. The current preregistered pharmacological eye-tracking study employed a randomized within-subject placebo-controlled design to investigate the effects of intranasal OT (24 IU) on patterns of eye gaze in male subjects performing the MET and to replicate previous findings demonstrating OT-induced facilitation of emotional empathy (Hurlemann et al, 2010; Geng et al, 2018a,b). Based on the previous studies reporting that OT facilitated facial emotion recognition and eye gaze toward facial stimuli, we hypothesized that the OT-induced facilitation of emotional empathy would be associated with increased gaze time toward the face and away from other less socially salient features of both positive and negative valence picture stimuli. We hypothesized that the observed effects of OT on emotional empathy ratings and time spent viewing faces would be associated with individual variations in autistic and/or empathic traits
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
