European Journal of Psychotraumatology (Sep 2012)
The effect of intranasal oxytocin on perceiving and understanding emotion on the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test
Abstract
Background : There is increasing evidence that oxytocin promotes empathy in humans. However, research on oxytocin and emotion recognition, a fundamental component of empathy, has yielded inconsistent results. Part of the problem is that studies have focused on limited, and varying, categories of emotional stimuli. Therefore, we investigated the effect of intranasal oxytocin on the identification of seven basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, excitement, surprise, disgust, and anger) using social and non-social stimuli, and we explored the effect of oxytocin on conceptual understanding of emotion. Method : Eighty-two participants were administered a 24IU dose of intranasal oxytocin or placebo in a double-blind experiment. Participants completed the perceiving (faces, designs) and understanding (blends, changes) emotion components of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) 120 minutes after drug administration. Results : Contrary to our prediction, standardized scores for accurately detecting emotions during the faces task of the MSCEIT were lower following oxytocin administration than placebo (F(1,80) = 8.861, p<.01, η2=.10). Accuracy ratings worsened following oxytocin because participants rated all emotions with greater intensity, particularly facial expressions of surprise and disgust. Oxytocin did not influence performance on tasks related to understanding emotions or tasks using non-social stimuli. Conclusions : Oxytocin appears to influence the recognition of facial expressions of emotion by increasing the perceived intensity of the emotion, while having no effect on more complex processing (i.e., understanding emotion). The present findings further support the view that oxytocin influences social information processing by increasing the salience of emotional stimuli, which may have positive or negative effects depending on context.
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