ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2016
The µ-opioid system promotes visual attention to faces and eyes.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Endogenous mu-opioid modulation of social connection in humans: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Translational psychiatry · 2024Pooled it
- Seeing the bigger picture: endogenous opioids mediate attentional broadening after reward receipt.Psychological medicine · 2025Trial
- Effects of opioid receptor stimulation and blockade on touch pleasantness: a double-blind randomised trial.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Trial
- Effects of opioid- and non-opioid analgesics on responses to psychosocial stress in humans.Hormones and behavior · 2018Trial
- Trait judgements of faces using a task without word labels.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Opioid Regulation of Social Homeostasis: Connecting Loneliness to Addiction.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Recalled through this day but forgotten next week?-retrieval activity predicts durability of partly consolidated memories.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Opioidergic tuning of social attachment: reciprocal relationship between social deprivation and opioid abuse.Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2024Review
- Social Psychopharmacology: Novel Approaches to Treat Deficits in Social Motivation in Schizophrenia.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2023Review
- The partial µ-opioid agonist buprenorphine in autism spectrum disorder: a case report.Journal of medical case reports · 2022Article
- Pharmacological investigations of effort-based decision-making in humans: Naltrexone and nicotine.PloS one · 2022Article
- μ-Opioid Receptor (Oprm1) Copy Number Influences Nucleus Accumbens Microcircuitry and Reciprocal Social Behaviors.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Pharmacological fMRI provides evidence for opioidergic modulation of discrimination of facial pain expressions.Psychophysiology · 2021Article
- The Role of Mu-Opioids for Reward and Threat Processing in Humans: Bridging the Gap from Preclinical to Clinical Opioid Drug Studies.Current addiction reports · 2021Review
- Filtered beauty in Oslo and Tokyo: A spatial frequency analysis of facial attractiveness.PloS one · 2020Article
- Targeting opioid dysregulation in depression for the development of novel therapeutics.Pharmacology & therapeutics · 2019Review
- The role of the opioid system in decision making and cognitive control: A review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2019Review
- Opioid-Independent and Opioid-Mediated Modes of Pain Modulation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2018Article
- Titi Monkeys as a Novel Non-Human Primate Model for the Neurobiology of Pair Bonding .The Yale journal of biology and medicine · 2017Review
- Opioid Modulation of Value-Based Decision-Making in Healthy Humans.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Paying attention to others' faces and eyes is a cornerstone of human social behavior. The µ-opioid receptor (MOR) system, central to social reward-processing in rodents and primates, has been proposed to mediate the capacity for affiliative reward in humans. We assessed the role of the human MOR system in visual exploration of faces and eyes of conspecifics. Thirty healthy males received a novel, bidirectional battery of psychopharmacological treatment (an MOR agonist, a non-selective opioid antagonist, or placebo, on three separate days). Eye-movements were recorded while participants viewed facial photographs. We predicted that the MOR system would promote visual exploration of faces, and hypothesized that MOR agonism would increase, whereas antagonism decrease overt attention to the information-rich eye region. The expected linear effect of MOR manipulation on visual attention to the stimuli was observed, such that MOR agonism increased while antagonism decreased visual exploration of faces and overt attention to the eyes. The observed effects suggest that the human MOR system promotes overt visual attention to socially significant cues, in line with theories linking reward value to gaze control and target selection. Enhanced attention to others' faces and eyes represents a putative behavioral mechanism through which the human MOR system promotes social interest.
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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.