“Our study shows that oxytocin affects the brain and opens up the possibility that, when combined with behavioral treatments, it works like a social enhancer,” he said. The scientists used a technique called functional MRI to scan the brains of 17 youths aged eight to 16 with autism while they looked at images of cars or the eyes of people expressing various emotions. The scans were given 45 minutes after the participants inhaled a placebo or oxytocin through a nasal spray. The scans showed that reward circuitry in the children’s brains behaved more normally after a snort of oxytocin, being more active when the person was looking at faces and less active when viewing the inanimate cars. The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
What were the two different groups in the experiment?
One group was given oxytocin; the other was given placebo One received oxytocin through injections; the other through a nose spray One group looked at images of cars; the other looked at images of facial expressions One group was given behavioral therapy; the other was given cognitive therapy