Vasopressin, but not oxytocin, increases empathic concern among individuals who received higher levels of paternal warmth: A randomized controlled trial
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 125 undergraduate students from the University of California, Los Angeles (90 female, age range = 18–31 years, Mean age = 20.88, SD = 2.71). They were randomly assigned to receive intranasal AVP (n = 42; 30 female, 12 male), OT (n = 42; 30 female, 12 male) or placebo (n = 41; 30 female, 11 male). Exclusion criteria included current allergies or cold symptoms as well as present or history of heart disease, hypertension, myocardial infarction, cardiac arrhythmia, kidney or liver disease,
Results
To ensure that any observed effects of drug condition were not simply due to changes in positive or negative affect, we first assessed non-specific main effects of drug condition (AVP, OT, placebo) on changes in positive and negative affect. No differences were found between drug conditions on pre–post changes in positive, F(2, 122) = .05, p = .95, or negative affect, F(2, 122) = 1.73, p = .18 (See Table 1 for group means and SDs).
With regard to the videos, there was a main effect of video type
Discussion
Our findings provide the first evidence that childhood experiences of paternal warmth moderate the effect of AVP on empathic concern. Specifically, AVP increased empathic concern in a sample of female and male participants who experienced higher levels of paternal warmth in childhood. This effect was not found for OT and it was not gender specific. In addition, this effect was observed for both the distressing and the uplifting videos, suggesting that these effects extend across empathy for the
Role of the funding source
Funding was provided by the UCLA Jeffrey/Wenzel Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience (to N.I.E.). A postdoctoral fellowship for B.A.T. was supported by the T32MH015750 training fellowship in Biobehavioral Issues in Physical and Mental Health at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Conflict of interest
The authors declared that they had no conflict of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Kayla Asato and Zhixing Luo for their assistance in data collection and statistical analysis. We would also like to thank Jocelyn Sze and Robert Levenson for providing us with their video stimuli.
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