The Relationship Between Oxytocin And Creative Thinking:The Moderating Effect Of Approach And Avoidance Motivation

Creative thinking is the driving force of the development of human social civilization.In recent years,oxytocin secreted in the posterior pituitary gland has been associated with creative thinking because of its wide promotion effect on the pro-social behavior of human beings with the tendency of approaching.However,the essence of the relationship between oxytocin and creative thinking is unclear.In fact,oxytocin receptor is widely distributed in the central nervous system.In addition to promoting human approach behavior by acting on the hippocampus,it also acts on amygdala to regulate the fear response to avoid danger.So,as a psychological process that both approach motivation and avoidance motivation can stimulate,will creative thinking also be regulated by oxytocin?Does this regulation exist in all aspects of creative thinking?Will it be different because of different types of motivation?Does it affect the activation of the cortex involved in creative processes,including the temporal lobe related to semantic representation?We explored these issues through the following two studies.In Experiment 1,the moderating effect of motivation temperaments on the relationship between oxytocin and creative thinking was investigated.Because the two most important components of creative thinking are divergent thinking and convergent thinking,this experiment used the alternative uses test(AUT)and Chinese compound remote association task(CCRAT)to measure these two kinds of thinking.According to the total score of Chinese version of BAS/BIS(approach subscale score minus avoidance subscale score),half of the subjects with higher scores were divided into approach group and half of the subjects with lower scores were divided into avoidance group.So far,there are three main research methods of oxytocin,which are gene sequencing,plasma oxytocin and intranasal injection of oxytocin.The former two methods can only examine the correlation between oxytocin and behavior,but the third method can examine the causal relationship between oxytocin and behavior.Therefore,this paper adopted the double-blind,in subject design of placebo-control group to investigate the differences of task performance of subjects sprayed with oxytocin versus placebo in both motivation groups.The results showed that for the approach group,oxytocin significantly enhanced the novelty of performance in the alternative uses test,but there was no significant difference in the performance of the avoidance group between the two kinds of spray.In addition,the main effect and interaction effect of drugs and motivation types were not significant for Chinese compound remote association task.In Experiment 2,the moderating effect of motivation states on the relationship between oxytocin and creative thinking was investigated.Avoidance motivation is not only a long-term stable personality trait,but also easily induced by various situations in daily life.Additionally,the results of Experiment 1 may be interfered by other covariant traits due to the lack of manipulation of motivation.Therefore,this paper randomly induced the types of motivation by recalling personal experience without cultural background restriction.The measurement of creative thinking and the research method of oxytocin in this experiment were the same as those in Experiment 1.In addition,there was no significant result in CCRAT task in Experiment 1.In order to eliminate the possibility that the behavior response was not sensitive enough,some subjects were randomly selected in Experiment 2 for near infrared scanning.The results of study 2 repeatedly verified the results of the preceding study.Oxytocin could effectively promote the novelty of divergent thinking task performance in approach induced group,but not in avoidance induced group.The results of near-infrared scanning support the interaction effect in behavioral results.In divergent thinking task,oxytocin had different effects on the activation levels of temporal lobe,prefrontal lobe and angular gyrus in individuals with approach versus avoidance motivation.Compared with placebo,the activation of middle temporal gyrus,angular gyrus,and prefrontal lobe in the approach group were significantly decreased,enhanced,and increased gradually;However,in the avoidance group,there was no significant change in the activation level of the middle temporal gyrus and angular gyrus after oxytocin nasal spray.For the fluency of divergent thinking task,we found the main effect of induced motivation,discrimination of which was higher.Specifically,the fluency of avoidance induced group was better than that of approach induced group.For Chinese compound remote association task,the main effect and interaction effect of the two independent variables were not significant.Moreover,we found that the difference of fluency in AUT between the two groups may be related to the difference of rTPJ activation.The activation of prefrontal cortex(PFC)did not show significant main effects or interaction effect of oxytocin and avoidance motivation,indicating that the effect of oxytocin on creativity is not mediated by acting on prefrontal dopamine circuit,but may be mediated by acting on striatal dopamine circuit related to motivation regulation,which needs further experimental verification in the future.The results of fNIR showed that only the prefrontal cortex was activated,and there was no interaction effects on the temporal lobe and the temporoparietal junction.The lack of co-operation of multiple brain regions may be the reason why oxytocin has no significant effect on the performance in CCRAT of individuals with approach versus avoidance motivations.In conclusion,we found that both temperament type and temporarily induced state type of approach-avoidance motivation regulated the relationship between oxytocin and creative thinking,and this regulation specifically occurred in the alternative uses test.Specifically,oxytocin significantly promoted the novelty of divergent thinking only in the approach group but not in the avoidance group.However,there was no similar interaction in the results of convergent thinking,indicating that the regulatory effect of motivation on the relationship between oxytocin and creative thinking did not appear in convergent thinking measured by CCRAT.