ArticleTranslational psychiatry2018
Epigenetic regulation of the oxytocin receptor is associated with neural response during selective social attention.
Article in Translational psychiatry, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
42 citing papers in PubMed.
- Maternal care is associated with neural and behavioral effects of oxytocin administration during empathic accuracy in schizophrenia and controls.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2025Trial
- The epigenetic archaeology of human-dog companionship.Epigenetics · 2026Review
- Bridging Genes and Behavior in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Contributions of OXTR Gene Variants and Methylation to Brain Connectivity Patterns.Psychiatry investigation · 2026Article
- An epigenetic framework for understanding contextual influences on neural and socio-emotional development: Narrative review and case-study of the oxytocin receptor.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
- Unraveling the impact of oxytocin receptor gene methylation on stress and inflammation in older adults.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2026Article
- The Convergence of Early-Life Stress and Autism Spectrum Disorder on the Epigenetics of Genes Key to the HPA Axis.Biology · 2025Review
- The interplay between functional connectivity of medial and lateral visual networks, behavioral measures, and oxytocin receptor gene polymorphism (rs2254298) in autism.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2025Article
- Epigenetics, Resilience, Protective Factors and Factors Promoting Positive Outcomes: A Scoping Review.International journal of developmental neuroscience : the official journal of the International Society for Developmental Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Dissecting the heterogeneity of autism spectrum disorder with sensory behavior, brain, and epigenetic factors.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Interplay of plasma Oxytocin and oxytocin receptor gene methylation levels on empathy in older adults.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The impact of the early environment on oxytocin receptor epigenetics and potential therapeutic implications.Pediatric research · 2025Review
- Parent attention-orienting behavior is associated with neural entropy in infancy.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Detection, processing and reinforcement of social cues: regulation by the oxytocin system.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2023Review
- Functional brain connectivity during social attention predicts individual differences in social skill.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Roles of the Oxytocin Receptor (OXTR) in Human Diseases.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- DNA methylation of the oxytocin receptor interacts with age to impact neural response to social stimuli.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2023Article
- Social attention during object engagement: toward a cross-species measure of preferential social orienting.Journal of neurodevelopmental disorders · 2022Article
- Combinatorial approaches for treating neuropsychiatric social impairment.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Neuroepigenetic impact on mentalizing in childhood.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Social experience alters oxytocinergic modulation in the nucleus accumbens of female prairie voles.Current biology : CB · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Aberrant attentional biases to social stimuli have been implicated in a number of disorders including autism and social anxiety disorder. Oxytocin, a naturally-occurring mammalian hormone and neuromodulator involved in regulating social behavior, has been proposed to impact basic biological systems that facilitate the detection of and orientation to social information. Here, we investigate a role for naturally-occurring variability in the endogenous oxytocinergic system in regulating neural response during attention to social information. Participants performed a selective social attention task while undergoing fMRI, provided a blood sample for epigenetic analysis, and completed self-report measures of social functioning. We find that a functional epigenetic modification to the oxytocin receptor, OXTR methylation, is associated with increased neural response within and decreased functional coupling between regions of the salience and attentional control networks during selective social attention. We also show that subclinical variability in autistic and social anxiety traits moderates this epigenetic regulation of neural response. These data offer a mechanistic explanation to a growing literature associating social behavior and disorder with epigenetic modification to OXTR by suggesting that OXTR methylation reflects a decrease in the extent to which social information automatically captures attention. We highlight the importance that treatment efficacy be considered in relation to individual differences in molecular makeup, and that future studies aimed at uncovering biomarkers of disorder carefully consider measurement at both the biological and phenotypic level.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.