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Emotion recognition and oxytocin in patients with schizophrenia

Authors:
Bruno Averbeck at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Bruno Averbeck
Tang Bobin at Chongqing Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau
Tang Bobin
  • Chongqing Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau
S Evans
S Evans
S Evans
  • This person is not on ResearchGate, or hasn't claimed this research yet.
Sukhi Shergill at King's College London
Sukhi Shergill
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Background Studies have suggested that patients with schizophrenia are impaired at recognizing emotions. Recently, it has been shown that the neuropeptide oxytocin can have beneficial effects on social behaviors. Method To examine emotion recognition deficits in patients and see whether oxytocin could improve these deficits, we carried out two experiments. In the first experiment we recruited 30 patients with schizophrenia and 29 age- and IQ-matched control subjects, and gave them an emotion recognition task. Following this, we carried out a second experiment in which we recruited 21 patients with schizophrenia for a double-blind, placebo-controlled cross-over study of the effects of oxytocin on the same emotion recognition task. Results In the first experiment we found that patients with schizophrenia had a deficit relative to controls in recognizing emotions. In the second experiment we found that administration of oxytocin improved the ability of patients to recognize emotions. The improvement was consistent and occurred for most emotions, and was present whether patients were identifying morphed or non-morphed faces. Conclusions These data add to a growing literature showing beneficial effects of oxytocin on social–behavioral tasks, as well as clinical symptoms.
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  • BSRCCS
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... Thus, there has been growing interest in the use of oxytocin as a treatment for schizophrenia [181]. A study of oxytocin treatment in people with schizophrenia found improvements in emotion recognition [157] and cognition [184]. The positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia improve significantly with sustained intranasal oxytocin administration paired with antipsychotic medications, but major improvements were also realized with just a single dose of intranasal oxytocin [185]. ...
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  • Jun 2023
  • INT J MOL SCI
Early-life stress during critical periods of brain development can have long-term effects on physical and mental health. Oxytocin is a critical social regulator and anti-inflammatory hormone that modulates stress-related functions and social behaviors and alleviates diseases. Oxytocin-related neural systems show high plasticity in early postpartum and adolescent periods. Early-life stress can influence the oxytocin system long term by altering the expression and signaling of oxytocin receptors. Deficits in social behavior, emotional control, and stress responses may result, thus increasing the risk of anxiety, depression, and other stress-related neuropsychiatric diseases. Oxytocin is regarded as an important target for the treatment of stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders. Here, we describe the history of oxytocin and its role in neural circuits and related behaviors. We then review abnormalities in the oxytocin system in early-life stress and the functions of oxytocin in treating stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders.
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... Oxytocin (OT) has increasingly gathered the interest of cognitive neuroscientists since it was shown to be implicated in social cognition and behavior in humans (Erdozain and Peñagarikano, 2020) and potentially in the elusive pathophysiology of social symptoms in psychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (Huang et al., 2021;Zhao et al., 2022), schizophrenia (Liu et al., 2019), and borderline personality disorder (Jawad et al., 2021). Highly promising early studies (Averbeck et al., 2012) gave hope that pharmacological administration of OT may mitigate social behavioral deficits in these conditions (Huang et al., 2021;Shilling and Feifel, 2016). However, there is, thus far, inconsistency in findings, variability in the methods and in the outcomes and response biomarkers measured (Winterton et al., 2021), with insufficient metanalytical evidence of improvement in clinical populations (Huang et al., 2021;Sabe et al., 2021). ...
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... Exogenous OXT treatment has been also associated with improvements in the sociocognitive deficits of schizophrenia. For instance, participants showed improvement in the ability to recognize and identify emotions, as well as indirectly expressed emotions, thoughts, and intentions, following 20-40 IU intranasally administered OXT [65][66][67]. Similarly, acute OXT treatment enhanced emotion recognition accuracy in a task that required social cue processing [68]. ...
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Article
Full-text available
  • Mar 2023
  • BSRCCS
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... It is impressive that 3/5 of the clinical trials mentioned above design for IN-Oxt to test its antipsychotic effects on improving symptoms, such as positive, negative, and cognitive deficits. A few clinical studies were designed to test oxytocin's ability to enhance social cognitive training, which was positive but could not reduce positive and negative symptoms [56][57][58][59][60][61]. IN-Oxt is well-tolerated and produces almost no adverse effects, rendering oxytocin a promising candidate for safe and innovative treatment of schizophrenia [62]. ...
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Article
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  • CNS NEUROL DISORD-DR
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Role of Oxytocin in Different Neuropsychiatric, Neurodegenerative, and Neurodevelopmental Disorders
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Oxytocin has recently gained significant attention because of its role in the pathophysiology and management of dominant neuropsychiatric disorders. Oxytocin, a peptide hormone synthesized in the hypothalamus, is released into different brain regions, acting as a neurotransmitter. Receptors for oxytocin are present in many areas of the brain, including the hypothalamus, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens, which have been involved in the pathophysiology of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Animal studies have spotlighted the role of oxytocin in social, behavioral, pair bonding, and mother–infant bonding. Furthermore, oxytocin protects fetal neurons against injury during childbirth and affects various behaviors, assuming its possible neuroprotective characteristics. In this review, we discuss some of the concepts and mechanisms related to the role of oxytocin in the pathophysiology and management of some neuropsychiatric, neurodegenerative, and neurodevelopmental disorders.KeywordsNeurological disordersNeuromodulatorNeurotransmittersOxytocin
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Modulating oxytocin brain penetration via intranasal delivery and a novel conjugate peptide (OT-GET)
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A review of emotion deficits in schizophrenia
Article
Full-text available
  • Apr 2022
Emotion deficits in schizophrenia have been described since the time of Kraepelin. However, no comprehensive review of clinical emotion studies has ever been conducted, in this work, studies that used diagnostic criteria and were published in English were selected from an extensive PubMed search. Fifty-five studies on emotion expression repeatedly showed that individuals with schizophrenia (IWSs) display fewer overt expressions than non patient comparison subjects (NCSs) in verbal, facial, and acoustic channels. No clear differences were found between IWSs and depressed subjects. Sixty-nine studies examined emotion experience in schizophrenia. IWSs report higher anhedonia, and they tend to show more negative emotions in real-life event studies. In evocative studies, they report a similar degree of pleasantness and a similar or higher degree of unpleasantness. From 110 studies, ii can be concluded that emotion recognition is impaired in schizophrenia in all channels. These deficits in social perception are correlated with neurocognitive deficits and some social skills. IWSs show dysfunction in the three domains of emotion expression, emotion experience, and emotion recognition, and these dysfunctions appear to be independent of each other across domains. These deficits in basic emotion processing may be linked to psychopathology and functional outcomes.
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Post-learning intranasal oxytocin modulates human memory for facial identity
Article
Full-text available
  • Apr 2008
  • PSYCHONEUROENDOCRINO
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Oxytocin attenuates affective evaluations of conditioned faces and amygdala activity
Article
  • Jun 2008
Social relations between humans critically depend on our affective experiences of others. Oxytocin enhances prosocial behavior, but its effect on humans’ affective experience of others is not known. We tested whether oxytocin influences affective ratings, and underlying brain activity, of faces that have been aversively conditioned. Using a standard conditioning procedure, we induced differential negative affective ratings in faces exposed to an aversive conditioning compared with nonconditioning manipulation. This differential negative evaluative effect was abolished by treatment with oxytocin, an effect associated with an attenuation of activity in anterior medial temporal and anterior cingulate cortices. In amygdala and fusiform gyrus, this modulation was stronger for faces with direct gaze, relative to averted gaze, consistent with a relative specificity for socially relevant cues. The data suggest that oxytocin modulates the expression of evaluative conditioning for socially relevant faces via influences on amygdala and fusiform gyrus, an effect that may explain its prosocial effects.
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Facial Emotion Recognition after Bilateral Amygdala Damage: Differentially Severe Impairment of Fear
Article
  • Jul 1996
Although the amygdala is widely believed to have a role in the recognition of emotion, a central issue concerns whether it is involved in the recognition of all emotions or whether it is more important to some emotions than to others. We describe studies of two people, DR and SE, with impaired recognition of facial expressions in the context of bilateral amygdala damage. When tested with photographs showing facial expressions of emotion from the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series, both DR and SE showed deficits in the recognition of fear. Problems in recognising fear were also found using photographic quality images interpolated ("morphed") between prototypes of the six emotions in the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series to create a hexagonal continuum (running from happiness to surprise to fear to sadness to disgust to anger to happiness). Control subjects identified these morphed images as belonging to distinct regions of the continuum, corresponding to the nearest prototype expression. However, DR and SE were impaired on this task, with problems again being most clearly apparent in the region of the fear prototype, An equivalent test of recognition of morphed identities of six famous faces was performed normally by DR, confirming the dissociability of impairments affecting the recognition of identity and expression from the face. Further two-way forced-choice tests showed that DR was unable to tell fear from anger, but could tell happiness from sadness without difficulty. The finding that the recognition of fear can be differentially severely affected by brain injury is consistent with reports of the effects of bilateral amygdala damage in another case (Adolphs, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1994, 1995). The recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions may therefore be linked, to some extent, to specific neural substrates.
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Oxytocin Administered Centrally Facilitates Formation of a Partner Preference in Female Prairie Voles (Microtus ochrogaster)
Article
  • Jun 1994
  • J NEUROENDOCRINOL
Prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are monogamous mammals that form male-female pair bonds. Partner preference formation, one component of the pair bond in prairie voles, occurs following male-female cohabitation and is facilitated by mating. The peptide hormone oxytocin is released during physical contact and particularly following vaginal stimulation. Oxytocin has been implicated in mother-infant bond formation. The present study tested the hypothesis that oxytocin participates in the partner preference component of pair bond formation in adult prairie voles. Ovariectomized female prairie voles were implanted with osmotic mini-pumps releasing oxytocin (1–100 ng/h) or artificial cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Pumps were implanted intracerebroventricularly or subcutaneously and females then were housed for 6 h with a male partner, followed by a preference test in which females could elect to spend time with either the partner or an unfamiliar male. Females in groups that received centrally-administered oxytocin (10 or 100 ng/h), but not CSF, exhibited a significant preference for the partner present during infusion. The induction of a partner preference after oxytocin administration appeared specific for central oxytocin pathways as peripheral oxytocin administration was ineffective. Moreover, central administration of a selective oxytocin receptor antagonist inhibited the behavioral effect of exogenous oxytocin. These results suggest that oxytocin may be one factor contributing to the development of partner preferences in this monogamous rodent.
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