Modulatory Effects Of Oxytocin And Its Receptor On Emotional Processing

The human face as a social stimulus is very important to human beings who could survive in the complex social world.Due to the face contains lots of social information,such as identity,emotion,intention and so on,which plays a vital role in human social interaction and communication,therefore research on the facial processing appears to be particularly important.There are numbers of research on oxytocin has shown influence to complex social cognitions and social behaviors,and it has therapeutic potential for the treatment of mental disorders characterized by social functioning deficits such as social phobia,borderline personality disorder and autism.In the meanwhile,intranasal administration of the neuropeptide oxytocin exists difference in individual responses,such as gender,different personalities and different oxytocin receptor genes.Researches have shown that genetic polymorphisms of oxytocin receptor maybe have the relation to prosocial behavior,empathy and neuropsychiatric.Variations of oxytocin receptor genotypes may be biomarkers for social dysfunction across numbers of psychiatric disorders.However,it is not clear whether there is a regulatory role of oxytocin receptor genotype.Our study aims at exploring the role of nasal oxytocin in the regulation of emotional facial processing and the regulation by oxytocin receptor gene,which can enrich the basic research of face processing and optimize the application of oxytocin receptor gene on intranasal administration oxytocinHere,we undertook an Emotional face recognition task and combine the brain imaging technology to investigate the role of genetic variation in sensitivity to exogenous oxytocin.In a randomized,placebo-controlled trial,double-blind design,120 male subjects participated the experiment.Participants randomly nasal sprayed international single doses(24IU)of oxytocin or placebo(oxytocin group: 75 subjects;placebo group: 36 subjects).Subjects started to do the recognition task 45 minutes after intranasal oxytocin or placebo.During the task,subjects were asked to judge the gender of the person in the picture and do the response by pressing buttons.After finishing the fMRI task,subjects were asked to evaluate these pictures again from three aspects: valence,intensity and arousal(rating from 1 to 9).The reaction time and the accuracy by pressing button as well as evaluation scores were conducted data analysis as dependent variables.In the brain imaging level,we particularly investigated the brain activities during the gender judgement task.Otherwise,we used chain reaction method to measure the single nucleotide polymorphisms of oxytocin receptor gene and its genotype,investigating thoroughly the influence of oxytocin receptor gene.The behavioral results showed that oxytocin did not have significant influence on reaction time and accuracy,while in the evaluation task on valence oxytocin significantly increased the evaluation of fear and decreased the evaluation of happy.There were significant differences in the accuracy of emotional processing between carriers of different genotypes of the oxytocin receptor gene rs2268498 and rs237887.In the brain imaging level,oxytocin significantly reduced the activation of the right amygdala and also reduced the activation of the superior frontal gyrus and bilateral visual cortex.In addition,the oxytocin receptor gene rs53576 G-carriers significantly reduced the activation of the right amygdala under the action of oxytocin.The exploratory factor analysis of oxytocin significantly reduced activation of the suprafrontal gyrus and bilateral visual cortex in A+ carrier.In conclusion,oxytocin decreased the activation of the right amygdala,in the meanwhile polymorphisms of oxytocin receptor gene regulated the influence of oxytocin in the emotion processing.These brain changes can serve as neurobiological markers for the diagnosis and treatment of psychosis with social emotional dysfunction.