Boys Own Empathy Drug

Interesting little snippet in New Scientist this week. A quick snort of Oxycontin improves your empathy but only if you are male.

The trust hormone, it seems, is also the mind-reading hormone. A sniff of oxytocin, which underpins social attachment among animals, also turns out to improve men's ability to read other people's emotions.

Two years ago, researchers reported that oxytocin increases trust. Now a team led by Gregor Domes at Rostock University, Germany has investigated one of the basic components of trust: emotional recognition.

The researchers sprayed oxytocin up the noses of 30 men and tested how well they could read the emotions conveyed by photographs of eyes taken in real-life situations. Twenty of them performed significantly better on the test after sniffing the hormone (Biological Psychiatry, vol 61, p 731). Domes suggests that oxytocin could be investigated as a treatment for people with autism, who struggle to read the emotions of others.

Read the original article here.

Comments

[Susan Kuchinskas]

Why do you say "boys only"? I don't think there's any evidence that sniffing oxytocin wouldn't have similar effects on women. In general, males are overwhelmingly the subjects of these and most studies, because it's difficult to account for fluctuations in women's hormonal levels.

Only one oxytocin study that I know of included women. See http://www.hugthemonkey.com/2006/06/oxytocin_keeps_.html

In that study of couples, the lead researcher, Beate Ditzen, found no differences in the effects between men and women.

In the case of this "mind-reading" test, women may perform better in general, which might make it harder to note a difference.

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[Theresa Korman]

Oxycontin and oxytocin are 2 different drugs was this a typo

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I found this article very interesting because it always has frusterated me that guys couldn't always tell what I was thinking! Does it have to be administered through the nose to be affective? I wonder what this drug would do to women then, since they seem to read people's emotions better than men. I liked this article, it was a fun tid-bit

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Ummm in the first sentence you refer to oxytocin as oxycontin

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