Brief ReportIntranasal Oxytocin Improves Emotion Recognition for Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Section snippets
Methods and Materials
We recruited 16 male subjects aged between 12 and 19 years (M = 14.88; SD = 2.42) who were diagnosed with a strict DSM-IV criteria of Autistic Disorder or Asperger's Disorder (2). Participants were recruited to the Brain & Mind Research Institute, University of Sydney, between December 2008 and March 2009 through local advertisement. In a double-blind, crossover, and randomized controlled trial, participants were assigned to receive a single dose of oxytocin and a placebo nasal spray 1 week
Results
Eight participants received oxytocin and eight received the placebo at the first test session. One participant repeatedly fell asleep during testing, a noted symptom for the child, and was excluded from analysis. In comparison with performance under placebo, results indicated that oxytocin improved performance on the RMET for 60% of participants, t(14) = 2.43, p = .03 (two-sided; Figure 1). We then split items into easy and hard items (7). The effect of oxytocin was highly significant for the
Discussion
Our findings reveal that oxytocin nasal spray improves emotion recognition for young people with autism spectrum disorders. Emotion recognition impairments are a core feature of these disorders. It has long been considered to have a heritable base (4) that may be too difficult to effectively treat. We are not aware of any brief intervention that has been shown to improve the ability to perceive or understand emotion in autism spectrum disorders. This study is also the first to apply treatment
References (19)
- et al.
Emotional communication in primates: Implications for neurobiology
Curr Opin Neurobiol
(2005) - et al.
The amygdala theory of autism
Neurosci Biobehav Rev
(2000) - et al.
Oxytocin improves “mind-reading” in humans
Biol Psychiatry
(2007) - et al.
Oxytocin increases gaze to the eye-region of human faces
Biol Psychiatry
(2008) - et al.
Screening young people for autism with the Developmental Behaviour Checklist
J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry
(2002) - et al.
Oxytocin increases retention of social cognition in autism
Biol Psychiatry
(2007) - et al.
Human neural systems for face recognition and social communication
Biol Psychiatry
(2002) - et al.
Oxytocin attenuates amygdala responses to emotional faces regardless of valence
Biol Psychiatry
(2007) - et al.
Oxytocin enhances the encoding of positive social memories in humans
Biol Psychiatry
(2008)