The Role Of Oxytocin In Modulating The Effects Of Social Feedback Upon Achieving Personal Goals

Sociality is one key feature of human beings and people could not live without healthy social interaction. In order to adapt better to the social environment, it is important for individuals to deal with others’ social feedback signals properly and to construct benign social relationships. Importantly, a growing number of clinical studies have demonstrated that social dysfunction is highly correlated with mental disorders, for example autism and schizophrenic. Therefore,it is expected to provide more effective solutions for these psychiatric illnesses by studying the psychological mechanisms associated with processing social feedback signals.A large number of neruophysiological studies in animals have suggested that the neuropeptide oxytocin(OXT), an evolutionarily ancient and conserved hormone, has been implicated to play a vital role within important reproductive and adaptive functions, including pair bonding and maternal behavior. Building on these animal researches, the past decade has witnessed a surge of research interest in that whether OXT could exert similar effects upon prosocial behaviors on humans.Seminal behavioral studies have revealed that OXT promotes prosociality, for example enhancing trust to strangers. More recently, some researches also reported that the social influences of OXT could be antisocial rather than being always positive, for example increasing violent behaviors.Therefore, it remains unknown whether OXT could increase the appetitive effects of positively valenced stimuli or and both decrease the aversive effects of negatively valenced stimuli. In order to address this issue, we tried to study OXT’s modulating effects upon processing social rewarding feedback and social punishing feedback.Moreover, it should be noted that most of previous studies about OXT’s effects on social feedback signals simply selected faces as experimental stimuli. However, social interaction involves a wide range of social contexts in which others’ social feedback signals could be transmitted as a number of forms, like verbal feedback, rather than the simple facial feedback. Therefore, we systematically compared the potential effects of OXT during receiving social feedback with three different forms. Additionally, we also attempted to testify the idea that the effects of OT when integrating social feedback could be further distinguished by the relative intensity of feedback per se.Our results showed that OXT promoted social perception by facilitating intrinsic reward and motivating individuals to initiate and maintain social interactions. Likewise,OT also enhanced subjects’ perceptual sensitivity to social punishment signals. Taken together, these findings suggested a general role of OXT in social cognition via increasing the salience of social cues that is sensitive to social contexts. What’s more,results also showed that OXT exerted significant effects upon processing negative verbal feedback, and these effects were extremely salient when feedback were expressed with apparent emotion. To account for these findings, one the one hand, it showed that emotion is one key component for detecting the perceptual salience of social cues. On the other hand, we speculated that it might be also associated with subjects’ particular social cultural background, which is consistent with the intriguing idea that culture indeed play a potential role in influencing individual social cognition.