English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

The influence of oxytocin on volitional and emotional ambivalence

MPS-Authors
There are no MPG-Authors in the publication available
External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

Preckel_2015.pdf
(Publisher version), 504KB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Preckel, K., Scheele, D., Eckstein, M., Maier, W., & Hurlemann, R. (2015). The influence of oxytocin on volitional and emotional ambivalence. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10(7), 987-983. doi:10.1093/scan/nsu147.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0027-ADBB-4
Abstract
Moral decisions and social relationships are often characterized by strong feelings of ambivalence which can be a catalyst for emotional distress and several health-related problems. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been identified as a key brain region in monitoring conflicting information, but the neurobiological substrates of ambivalence processing are still widely unknown. We have conducted two randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments involving 70 healthy male volunteers to investigate the effects of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) on neural and behavioral correlates of ambivalence. We chose moral decision-making and the imagery of partner infidelity as examples to probe volitional and emotional ambivalence. In both experiments, intranasal OXT diminished neural responses in the ACC to ambivalence. Under OXT, moral dilemma vignettes also elicited a reduced activation in the orbitofrontal cortex, and the imagery of partner infidelity was rated as less arousing. Interestingly, the OXT-induced differential activation in the ACC predicted the magnitude of arousal reduction. Taken together, our findings reveal an unprecedented role of OXT in causing a domain-general decrease of neural responses to ambivalence. By alleviating emotional distress, OXT may qualify as a treatment option for psychiatric disorders with heightened ambivalence sensitivity such as schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder.