L23 - Trust & Social Hormones Flashcards
What are the 2 hormones that are believed to play a critical role in the development and maintenance of social behaviour?
- Oxytocin (OXT)
- Arginine Vasopressin (AVP)
How do OXT and AVP work in the body?
They’re synthesised in the hypothalamus, and transported through the brain and also released into the blood through the pituitary gland.
Found in both men and women, but are claimed to have different roles - NOT a really founded suggestion due to those studies only investigating either men or women, but not comparing them.
What has OXT been found to be helpful for?
- Social/parental bonding
- Economic trust
How has OXT been found to help social/parental bonding?
- It motivates maternal behaviour and directly impacts feeding by contracting the milk ducts and causing milk ejection in lactating females.
- Improves communication between couples discussing a conflict in their relationship.
How has OXT been found to help economic trust?
- increases affiliative behaviour
Economic Trust Game
- When asked to choose how much money to invest in a trustee, who could quadruple or as little as they want
- one condition where they’re told theyre playing against a computer, and the other theyre told theyre playing against a perosn
- people given oxytocin gave more money than placebo in the trust game, particularly more likely to give the full $12
- no drug effect when the game was a risk game
- no drug effect on how much money was returned to investors by trustees
What are the positives and -ves of oxytocin use, regarding to future uses and ethics?
+Ve
- potential treatment for extreme social isolation, autism, social paranoia
- improves maternal bonding
- may help patient-doctor relationship and improve therapy
- ve
- administration through nasal spray means people may be unaware of drug pumped into air
- large risk of abuse to manipulate social or economic trust.
What are some negative effects of oxytocin?
- maternal agression
- out group discrimination - a consequence of in group preferences
- gloating and envy
- OXT ENHANCES SOCIAL SALIENCE, but also cooperation and conflict among humans in intergroup relations…
social salience = evaluating /valuing -ve things more -vely, and +ve things more +vely.
increases bonding with those that you would naturally bond with
Oxytocin and social processes?
- claimed that OXT increases sensitivity to social signals, enhances motivation for social involvement (reward network) and reduces anxiety about social interactions
- helps ASD.
- but how specifically SOCIAL are these effects? Are they just increased in overall salience detection?
the brain areas implicated as socially relevant and are affected by OXT are the same as the REWARD NETWORK (As seen in stress; hippocampus, amygdala, PFC).
These brain areas generally regulate effects outside of social interactions.
What is Arginine Vasopressin (AVP)?
- a peptide hormone primarily responsible for regulating water retention in the body.
- In respect to effects on the brain, less is known about AVP than OXT.
- evidence in annimals shows effects on affiliative behaviour - paternal, partner preference and pair bonding.
exists in both men and women but claim to only have effects on men..
What has AVP been found to do in humans?
- reduce stress responses and hostility associated with socially threatening cutes
- reduce inter male aggression
- increase trust and altruistic behaviour
- facilitates the encoding of facial identity - described in the following experiment.
- with a nasal AVP spray, men were found to judge angry and happy faces as more familiar (than neutral faces, and when compared to controls) - enhances encoding of happy and angry social info to make them more memorable, and could facilitate both encoding of positive and negative social cues
OXT and AVP in the clinic?
- both have been linked to the pathology or treatment/therapy for some clinical conditions including
- autism
- williams syndrome
- social anxiety
- stress
OXT and Autism?
- OXT facilitates neural responses during perception of faces, eyes and mouths but not houses.
- OXT improved performance on false belief tasks - improving social comunication by facilitation non verbal social judgement and social emotional inference
- improves tasks measuring empathy
- effects are small and generally not shown to increase with repeated dose. - need to treat the underlying problem
Why are studies using OXT and AVP questionable?
it’s been questioned whether or not nasal OXT and AVP actually reaches the brain.
also, the results of all these studies may be confounded by their general anxiolytic effects.
reduce anxiety –> better socially.
