ArticleHuman brain mapping2014
Opposing effects of oxytocin on moral judgment in males and females.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers, 2 of them syntheses 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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
50 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 114 citations in OpenAlex.
- Moral judgment and hormones: A systematic literature review.PloS one · 2022Pooled it
- The Role of Oxytocin in Antisocial Personality Disorders: A Systematic Review of the Literature.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2019Pooled it
- Acute lorazepam administration does not significantly affect moral attitudes or judgments.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Oxytocin, but not vasopressin, decreases willingness to harm others by promoting moral emotions of guilt and shame.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Trial
- Effects of exogenous oxytocin and estradiol on resting-state functional connectivity in women and men.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Intranasal oxytocin decreases self-oriented learning.Psychopharmacology · 2021Trial
- Oxytocin and vasopressin modulation of prisoner's dilemma strategies.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2020Trial
- Acute effects of oxytocin in music performance anxiety: a crossover, randomized, placebo-controlled trial.Psychopharmacology · 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
- The role of oxytocin on self-serving lying.Brain and behavior · 2020Trial
- How the brain codes intimacy: The neurobiological substrates of romantic touch.Human brain mapping · 2017Trial
- Oxytocin-enforced norm compliance reduces xenophobic outgroup rejection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Trial
- Oxytocin enhances cognitive control of food craving in women.Human brain mapping · 2016Trial
- Oxytocin blurs the self-other distinction during trait judgments and reduces medial prefrontal cortex responses.Human brain mapping · 2016Trial
- Oxytocin Facilitates Pavlovian Fear Learning in Males.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2016Trial
- The influence of oxytocin on volitional and emotional ambivalence.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2015Trial
- Oxytocin-induced modulation of explicit and implicit visual perspective taking.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- How does oxytocin modulate human behavior?Molecular psychiatry · 2025Review
- Would you? Effects of oxytocin on moral choices in forensic psychopathic patients.Comprehensive psychoneuroendocrinology · 2024Article
- Influence of perceived social support on detection of social norm violation: evidence from N1 and N400.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Current perspectives on the evolutionary roots of human morality suggest it arose to incentivize social cooperation by promoting feelings of disgust toward selfish behavior, although the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. To investigate whether the ancient mammalian neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) influences self-referential processing in the domains of emotion evaluation and moral decision making, we conducted a pharmaco-functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a behavioral experiment involving 157 healthy women and men who were treated with either OXT (24 IU) or placebo (PLC) intranasally. Our results show that OXT facilitated cortical midline responses during self-processing of disgust and selectively promoted self-interest moral judgments in men. In contrast, in women OXT increased the reaction time difference between accepted and rejected moral dilemmas and led them to suppress their self-interest and respond more altruistically for the benefit of others. Taken together, these findings suggest an OXT-related sexual dimorphism in human moral behavior which evolved adaptively to optimize both protection and nurturing of offspring by promoting selfish behavior in men and altruistic behavior in women.
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Registered trials
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.