Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

11-15-2016

Journal

Scientific Reports

Volume

6

Inclusive Pages

35054

DOI

10.1038/srep35054

Abstract

Oxytocin (OT) has become a focus in investigations of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The social deficits that characterize ASD may relate to reduced connectivity between brain sites on the mesolimbic reward pathway (nucleus accumbens; amygdala) that receive OT projections and contribute to social motivation, and cortical sites involved in social perception. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled crossover design, we show that OT administration in ASD increases activity in brain regions important for perceiving social-emotional information. Further, OT enhances connectivity between nodes of the brain's reward and socioemotional processing systems, and does so preferentially for social (versus nonsocial) stimuli. This effect is observed both while viewing coherent versus scrambled biological motion, and while listening to happy versus angry voices. Our findings suggest a mechanism by which intranasal OT may bolster social motivation-one that could, in future, be harnessed to augment behavioral treatments for ASD.

Comments

Reproduced with permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Scientific Reports

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Peer Reviewed

1

Open Access

1

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