“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.
Why did the scientists have autistic children look at both people and cars?
To see if oxytocin changed how their brains responded to them To analyze which regions of their brains respond more to people versus cars To evoke different emotions in the children These are the most common pictures shown to people used in brain research