Dissertation

The Effects of Intranasal Oxytocin on the Neural Circuitry of Social Cognition

Bessa, Ana Isabel Mendes

2018

Overview

Oxytocin (OXT) has multiple functions in the human body, both peripherally, as a hormone, and centrally, as a neuropeptide. OXT plays an important role in social behavior and cognition, which justifies the increasing interest it has been receiving lately. This effect on social cognition appears to be due to the biding of the OXT to specific brain areas that still haven’t been fully explored. We conducted a systematic review, using placebo-controlled studies that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the influence of intranasal OXT on the human brain, during social cognitive tasks. We identified 16 studies that met our inclusion criteria. The results show that oxytocin had influence in the activity of several brain areas: the amygdala, mainly in the processing of facial emotion and social scenes and in associative learning; the insula, which was implicated in tasks requiring empathy and altruism; cingulate cortex, activated during the anticipation of social reward/punishment; the caudate nucleus and putamen, both very active during cooperation tasks; the temporal and frontal lobes and their different regions, implicated, in a way or another, in every type of task the hippocampus. They also revealed that gender and type of task lead to significant variations in the activity of those brain structures.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Altruism / Cognition & reasoning / Cognitive psychology / Decision making / Medical imaging / Neuroimaging / Psychology / Third party
• ISBN: 9798841539889