Wu Xiaoyan, Xu Pengfei, Luo Yue-Jia, Feng Chunliang
Center of Brain Disorder and Cognitive Sicences, College of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Affective and Social Cognitive Science, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2018 Aug 15;12:329. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00329. eCollection 2018.
Arginine vasopressin (AVP) is a powerful regulator of various social behaviors across many species. However, seemingly contradictory effects of AVP have been found in both animal and human studies, e.g., promoting aggression on one hand and facilitating social bonding on the other hand. Therefore, we hypothesize that the role of AVP in social behaviors is context-dependent. To this end, we examined the modulatory effect of AVP on male's behavioral and neural responses to infant and adult cues. After intranasal and double-blind treatment of AVP or placebo, male participants were asked to rate their subjective approaching willingness to infant and adult faces in specific contexts informed by cue words while EEG recording. Our results showed that AVP treatment increased approaching ratings to neutral and positive other-gender adult faces compared to emotional matched same-gender adult faces, and to negative girl faces compared to negative boy faces. Furthermore, compared to placebo treatment, AVP treatment induced larger N1 amplitudes to neutral cues associated with both adults and infants, whereas AVP treatment only sustained pronounced late positive potential amplitudes to neutral cues of infants but not adults. Those findings implicate differential roles of AVP in the processing of adult- and infant-related cues and thus lend support to the context-dependent account.
精氨酸加压素（AVP）是多种物种中各种社会行为的强大调节因子。然而，在动物和人类研究中都发现了AVP看似矛盾的作用，例如，一方面促进攻击行为，另一方面促进社会联系。因此，我们假设AVP在社会行为中的作用取决于情境。为此，我们研究了AVP对男性对婴儿和成人线索的行为和神经反应的调节作用。在对AVP或安慰剂进行鼻内双盲治疗后，男性参与者被要求在脑电图记录的同时，在由提示词告知的特定情境中，对他们对婴儿和成人面孔的主观接近意愿进行评分。我们的结果表明，与情绪匹配的同性成人面孔相比，AVP治疗增加了对中性和积极的异性成人面孔的接近评分，与负面男孩面孔相比，对负面女孩面孔的接近评分也增加了。此外，与安慰剂治疗相比，AVP治疗对与成人和婴儿相关的中性线索诱发了更大的N1波幅，而AVP治疗仅对婴儿而非成人的中性线索持续保持明显的晚期正电位波幅。这些发现暗示了AVP在处理与成人和婴儿相关线索中的不同作用，从而支持了情境依赖的观点。
