ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2025
Effects of oxytocin on agency in anxiously attached individuals: a replication and extension.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Adult attachment and intimate relationship satisfaction among university students: the chain mediating roles of appreciation and sense of giving.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
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
Abstract
Oxytocin can promote prosocial behaviour but also result in anti-social effects in anxiously attached individuals. Such individuals desire interpersonal closeness but are preoccupied with abandonment; they also lack agency (self-efficacy, empowerment), possibly because of thwarted attachment needs. By augmenting affiliative strivings, oxytocin may threaten anxiously attached individuals' already fragile sense of agency. Indeed, prior work shows that oxytocin increases communion, especially for avoidant individuals, but decreases agency for anxious individuals. Here, we replicated the oxytocin-avoidance-communion effect (P < .001), with some additional nuance, and the oxytocin--anxiety-agency effect (P = .014) in a larger (N = 77; within-subject), gender diverse sample. We also investigated bodily agency using the rubber hand illusion paradigm. Anxious individuals also evidenced less bodily agency-experiencing greater 'loss of own hand'-although this was not potentiated by oxytocin. These findings may explain some of oxytocin's divergent social effects and highlight the tension that can arise between meeting needs for communion/security and agency in interpersonally vulnerable individuals.
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.