Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Oxytocin enhances brain reward system responses in men viewing the face of their female partner.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 135 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
135 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Grief-Related Psychopathology from Complicated Grief to DSM-5-TR Prolonged Grief Disorder: A Systematic Review of Biochemical Findings.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Pooled it
- Post-encoding administration of oxytocin selectively enhances memory consolidation of male faces in females.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Trial
- L-DOPA and oxytocin influence the neural correlates of performance monitoring for self and others.Psychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Effects of exogenous oxytocin and estradiol on resting-state functional connectivity in women and men.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Effects of intranasal oxytocin on threat- and reward-related functional connectivity in men and women with and without childhood abuse-related PTSD.Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging · 2021Trial
- Trial
- Eye-Tracking Reveals a Role of Oxytocin in Attention Allocation Towards Familiar Faces.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2021Trial
- Oxytocin effects on the resting-state mentalizing brain network.Brain imaging and behavior · 2020Trial
- Kinetics of oxytocin effects on amygdala and striatal reactivity vary between women and men.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2020Trial
- Common and dissociable effects of oxytocin and lorazepam on the neurocircuitry of fear.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Trial
- Oxytocin increases eye-gaze towards novel social and non-social stimuli.Social neuroscience · 2019Trial
- Oxytocin enhances the pain-relieving effects of social support in romantic couples.Human brain mapping · 2019Trial
- How the brain codes intimacy: The neurobiological substrates of romantic touch.Human brain mapping · 2017Trial
- Intranasal oxytocin, but not vasopressin, augments neural responses to toddlers in human fathers.Hormones and behavior · 2017Trial
- Intranasal oxytocin increases neural responses to social reward in post-traumatic stress disorder.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2017Trial
- Kisspeptin modulates sexual and emotional brain processing in humans.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2017Trial
- Oxytocin modulates hemodynamic responses to monetary incentives in humans.Psychopharmacology · 2016Trial
- Oxytocin enhances cognitive control of food craving in women.Human brain mapping · 2016Trial
- Oxytocin Facilitates Pavlovian Fear Learning in Males.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2016Trial
- The neuropeptide oxytocin modulates consumer brand relationships.Scientific reports · 2015Trial
75 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The biological mechanisms underlying long-term partner bonds in humans are unclear. The evolutionarily conserved neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) is associated with the formation of partner bonds in some species via interactions with brain dopamine reward systems. However, whether it plays a similar role in humans has as yet not been established. Here, we report the results of a discovery and a replication study, each involving a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject, pharmaco-functional MRI experiment with 20 heterosexual pair-bonded male volunteers. In both experiments, intranasal OXT treatment (24 IU) made subjects perceive their female partner's face as more attractive compared with unfamiliar women but had no effect on the attractiveness of other familiar women. This enhanced positive partner bias was paralleled by an increased response to partner stimuli compared with unfamiliar women in brain reward regions including the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). In the left NAcc, OXT even augmented the neural response to the partner compared with a familiar woman, indicating that this finding is partner-bond specific rather than due to familiarity. Taken together, our results suggest that OXT could contribute to romantic bonds in men by enhancing their partner's attractiveness and reward value compared with other women.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.