Oxytocin Regulates Negative Attentional Bias In Trait Anxiety Individuals

Anxiety is an essential part of human’s innate emotional feelings and daily life,and it plays an important role in both human survival and ethnic development.However,excessive anxiety may be accompanied by complications such as major depression,insomnia,suicide,and even have a close relationship with mental illness(such as social anxiety,generalized anxiety,etc.).As a neuropeptide substance,oxytocin can widely regulate human social behavior and attention mechanism.This experiment introduces oxytocin as a non-invasive intervention method,and explores the phenomenon of attentional bias in people with anxiety traits and the corresponding performance of oxytocin regulating attentional mechanism from the behavior level.Attentional bias,as an important feature of anxiety,has received considerable interest in behavioral and psychiatric related researches.At present,there are quite a few studies linking individual differences in anxiety to excessive vigilance against minor threats.Previous studies have shown that attention bias modification therapy can effectively reduce the attention bias of anxious individuals towards negative stimuli,thereby reducing anxiety symptoms.At the same time,some studies have pointed out that oxytocin may have anti-anxiety effect.Through nasal administration of oxytocin,anxiety individuals can improve the coding process of information,reduce the perception of negative stimuli and adjust the attention mechanism related to negative stimuli.However,whether the effect of oxytocin combined with attention bias modification therapy will enhance each other remains to be resolved.This experiment adopted an improved dot-probe paradigm combined with attention bias modification task,focusing on people with anxiety traits,nasal spray oxytocin,and attentional bias to negative stimulus.The first study examined the regulation of oxytocin on individual attention,and found that oxytocin strengthened the attention training effect of the subjects in the attention bias modification therapy.In addition,under the intervention of oxytocin,the attention bias of people with high trait anxiety had steadily improved,pointing out the potential of oxytocin to regulate attention of individuals with high trait anxiety.Study 2 further explored the ability of oxytocin to adjust the attention bias of individuals with high trait anxiety based on study 1.It was found that the accuracy rate of the oxytocin group decreased after receiving the nasal spray,but rose to a higher level than the placebo group after receiving the attention bias modification task.It was speculated that oxytocin may interfere with subjects’ attention patterns by selectively adjusting social cues.In addition,it was also found that subjects with high trait anxiety would only improve well after receiving oxytocin intervention within a specific anxiety range.These findings supported the social salience hypothesis of oxytocin and provided experimental support for the potential clinical application of oxytocin in anxious populations.