Differential Effects of Oral and Intranasal Oxytocin on Attention Control

Previous studies have demonstrated oral and intranasal oxytocin's divergent effects on arousal rating and neural responses to emotional faces, however, it remains unclear whether different routes of oxytocin treatment would have differential effects on attention processing to social stimuli. Based on the previous registered studies (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT04493515 and NCT03486925) from our group using a validated emotional anti-saccade task with social stimuli (emotional faces) and non-social stimuli (oval shape) have separately explored oral and intranasal oxytocin's modulatory effects on attention processing, the present study aims to conduct a secondary analysis of the previously acquired data to directly compare oxytocin's effects on attention control to social emotional stimuli via different routes. To this end data from subjects who underwent intranasal oxytocin administration (n = 33, NCT03486925) will be compared with data from subjects who underwent oral oxytocin or placebo administration (n = 36, or 37 respectively; NCT04493515). To further control for non-treatment related factors the intranasal placebo and oral placebo groups from the previous studies (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT03486925 and NCT04493515) will be compared with respect to primary and secondary outcome measures of the trial, in particular general and emotion-specific effects on attentional control.

Inclusion criteria

• Male, healthy participants
• Non smokers

Exclusion criteria

• Previous or current medical, psychiatric, neurological disorder
• Regular medication
• Use of any psychoactive substances in the 24 hours before experiment
• Contra-indications for eye-tracking data acquisition