Institute of Psychology, Department of Clinical Psychology, Leiden University and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, PO Box 9555, 2300 RB, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2017 Dec;234(23-24):3467-3474. doi: 10.1007/s00213-017-4737-z. Epub 2017 Sep 14.
Oxytocin administration may increase attention to emotional information. We hypothesized that this augmented emotional processing might in turn lead to interference on concurrent cognitive tasks. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether oxytocin administration would lead to heightened emotional interference during a working memory paradigm. Additionally, moderating effects of childhood maltreatment were explored.
Seventy-eight healthy males received 24 IU of intranasal oxytocin or placebo in a randomized placebo-controlled double-blind between-subjects study. A working memory task was performed during which neutral, positive, and negative distractors were presented.
The main outcome observed was that oxytocin did not enhance interference by emotional information during the working memory task. There was a non-significant trend for oxytocin to slow down performance irrespective of distractor valence, while accuracy was unaffected. Exploratory analyses showed that childhood maltreatment was related to lower overall accuracy, but in the placebo condition only. However, the maltreated group sample size was very small precluding any conclusions on its moderating effect.
Despite oxytocin's previously proposed role in enhanced emotional processing, no proof was found that this would lead to reduced performance on a concurrent cognitive task. The routes by which oxytocin exerts its effects on cognitive and social-emotional processes remain to be fully elucidated.
催产素的施用可能会增加对情绪信息的关注。我们假设这种增强的情绪处理反过来会导致对同时进行的认知任务的干扰。为了检验这一假设，我们研究了催产素的施用是否会在工作记忆范式中导致情绪干扰加剧。此外，还探讨了童年期虐待的调节作用。
78 名健康男性在一项随机、安慰剂对照、双盲的组间研究中接受了 24IU 的鼻腔内催产素或安慰剂。在进行工作记忆任务期间，呈现了中性、正性和负性的分心物。
主要观察结果是催产素并没有增强工作记忆任务中情绪信息的干扰。尽管催产素对干扰物的情绪效价没有显著影响，但存在着使其表现变慢的趋势，而准确性不受影响。探索性分析表明，童年期虐待与整体准确性降低有关，但仅在安慰剂条件下。然而，受虐待组的样本量很小，无法得出其调节作用的任何结论。
尽管催产素先前被提出在增强情绪处理方面发挥作用，但没有证据表明这会导致同时进行的认知任务的表现下降。催产素对认知和社会情感过程的影响途径仍有待充分阐明。
