Elsevier

Psychoneuroendocrinology

Volume 51, January 2015, Pages 253-261
Psychoneuroendocrinology

Vasopressin, but not oxytocin, increases empathic concern among individuals who received higher levels of paternal warmth: A randomized controlled trial

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2014.10.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We investigated the effect of AVP and OT on empathic responding.

  • We also examined the moderating role of maternal and paternal warmth.

  • AVP increased empathic concern in those who experienced more paternal warmth.

Summary

Background

Empathy improves our ability to communicate in social interactions and motivates prosocial behavior. The neuropeptides arginine vasopressin and oxytocin play key roles in socioemotional processes such as pair bonding and parental care, which suggests that they may be involved in empathic processing.

Methods

We investigated how vasopressin and oxytocin affect empathic responding in a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled, between-subjects study design. We also examined the moderating role of parental warmth, as reported in the early family environment, on empathic responding following vasopressin, oxytocin, or placebo administration.

Results

Among participants who reported higher levels of paternal warmth (but not maternal warmth), vasopressin (vs. placebo and oxytocin) increased ratings of empathic concern after viewing distressing and uplifting videos. No main or interaction effects were found for individuals who received oxytocin.

Conclusions

Vasopressin has a role in enhancing empathy among individuals who received higher levels of paternal warmth.

Trial registration

NCT01680718.

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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