Oxytocin attenuates social and non-social avoidance: Re-thinking the social specificity of Oxytocin

Re-examining decades of the social construal of Oxytocin, the General Approach-Avoidance Hypothesis of Oxytocin (GAAO) predicts that Oxytocin will modulate responding to emotionally-evocative and personally-relevant social and non-social stimuli due to its action on the neural substrate of approach and avoidance motivation. We report the first critical experimental test of GAAO predictions by means of a double-blind intra-nasal administration of Oxytocin vs. placebo in 90 healthy adults (N = 90, 50% women). As predicted, we found that among men and women for whom negative emotion (anxious arousal) is motivationally-relevant, intra-nasal administration of Oxytocin reduced behavioral avoidance of emotionally-evocative negatively-valenced social and non-social stimuli, but not closely matched emotionally-neutral stimuli. Findings cannot be explained by extant social theories of Oxytocin. We discuss the implications of the present findings for basic and translational clinical Oxytocin research.