Biological Basis of Individual Variation in Social Cooperation

Summary

The project has three overall objectives. The first is to determine whether and how administration of intranasal oxytocin (OT) and intranasal vasopressin (AVP) influence cooperative decision-making and neural responses to cooperative and un-cooperative social interactions. The second is to determine whether and how intranasal vasopressin influences subjective evaluations of and neural responses to same and opposite-sex face stimuli and to determine if any of these effects persist beyond the period of AVP exposure. The third objective is to determine if intranasal OT influences empathy-related behavior and associated brain activity.

Timeline

Start

2008-04

Primary completion

2016-11

Completion

2016-11

Publications

• Background Kosfeld M, Heinrichs M, Zak PJ, Fischbacher U, Fehr E. Oxytocin increases trust in humans. Nature. 2005 Jun 2;435(7042):673-6. doi: 10.1038/nature03701.
• Background Fisher H, Aron A, Brown LL. Romantic love: an fMRI study of a neural mechanism for mate choice. J Comp Neurol. 2005 Dec 5;493(1):58-62. doi: 10.1002/cne.20772.
• Background Thompson RR, George K, Walton JC, Orr SP, Benson J. Sex-specific influences of vasopressin on human social communication. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 May 16;103(20):7889-94. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0600406103. Epub 2006 May 8.
• Background Vrticka P, Andersson F, Sander D, Vuilleumier P. Memory for friends or foes: the social context of past encounters with faces modulates their subsequent neural traces in the brain. Soc Neurosci. 2009;4(5):384-401. doi: 10.1080/17470910902941793. Epub 2009 Jul 27.
• Background Singer T, Kiebel SJ, Winston JS, Dolan RJ, Frith CD. Brain responses to the acquired moral status of faces. Neuron. 2004 Feb 19;41(4):653-62. doi: 10.1016/s0896-6273(04)00014-5.
• Background Guroglu B, Haselager GJ, van Lieshout CF, Takashima A, Rijpkema M, Fernandez G. Why are friends special? Implementing a social interaction simulation task to probe the neural correlates of friendship. Neuroimage. 2008 Jan 15;39(2):903-10. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.09.007. Epub 2007 Sep 15.

Drugs

Indications

No indication recorded.