The effect of intranasal oxytocin on perceiving and understanding emotion on the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT)
Abstract
Evidence suggests that intranasal oxytocin enhances the perception of emotion in facial expressions during standard emotion identification tasks. However, it is not clear whether this effect is desirable in people who do not show deficits in emotion perception. That is, a heightened perception of emotion in faces could lead to "oversensitivity" to the emotions of others in nonclinical participants. The goal of this study was to assess the effects of intranasal oxytocin on emotion perception using ecologically valid social and nonsocial visual tasks. Eighty-two participants (42 women) self-administered a 24 IU dose of intranasal oxytocin or a placebo in a double-blind, randomized experiment and then completed the perceiving and understanding emotion components of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. In this test, emotion identification accuracy is based on agreement with a normative sample. As expected, participants administered intranasal oxytocin rated emotion in facial stimuli as expressing greater emotional intensity than those given a placebo. Consequently, accurate identification of emotion in faces, based on agreement with a normative sample, was impaired in the oxytocin group relative to placebo. No such effect was observed for tests using nonsocial stimuli. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that intranasal oxytocin enhances the salience of social stimuli in the environment, but not nonsocial stimuli. The present findings support a growing…
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More recent studies in humans suggest that Oxt's effects are nuanced and that intranasal Oxt treatment can have undesirable effects.
“Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that more recent studies in humans suggest that Oxt’s effects are nuanced (as the data from animal models would suggest) and that intranasal Oxt treatment can have undesirable effects (106–108).”
From Oxytocin during Development: Possible Organizational Effects on Behavior (2015) · cites this paper as [106]
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- Authors
- Cardoso, C., Ellenbogen, M. A., & Linnen, A.-M.
- Affiliations
- Concordia University (US)
- ORCID
- Ellenbogen, Mark A.
- Venue
- Emotion
- Published
- 2014
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 43-50
- ISSN
- 1528-3542 (ISSN-L)
- 1931-1516
- OpenAlex
- W2038764064
- Cited by
- 43
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 5 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 3
- FWCI
- 10.48
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Emotion (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
- Fonds de Recherche en Santé du Québec
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Sensory Systems › Olfactory and Sensory Function Studies
- Keywords
- intranasal oxytocin, emotion perception, emotional understanding, emotional intelligence, facial expression recognition, emotion recognition, social cognition, social salience, placebo effect
- MeSH terms
- Administration, Intranasal, Adolescent, Adult, Double-Blind Method, Emotions, Facial Expression, Female, Humans, Intelligence Tests, Male, Models, Psychological, Oxytocin, Perception, Social Behavior, Young Adult, Emotional Intelligence, Healthy Volunteers
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