Intranasal oxytocin (24 IU) enhanced emotional empathy by increasing the time healthy males spent looking at faces in emotional contexts, shifting attention from bodies and backgrounds.
Face gaze increasedoxytocin enhanced empathy by redirecting visual attention to faces, spending less time on bodies and backgrounds in emotional scenes
What the researchers found
Intranasal oxytocin (24 IU) enhanced emotional empathy responses to both positive and negative emotional stimuli in the Multifaceted Empathy Task, replicating previous findings across multiple cultures.
Eye-tracking revealed the mechanism: oxytocin increased the proportion of time participants spent viewing the faces of people in the pictures and decreased time spent viewing body posture and background context.
This suggests oxytocin does not directly amplify emotional processing. Instead, it redirects visual attention toward the most informative social cue (the face), which naturally leads to stronger empathic responses.
Why it matters
Understanding how oxytocin enhances empathy is important for developing it as a potential treatment for social deficits in autism and other conditions. If oxytocin works by redirecting attention to faces rather than directly boosting emotional processing, that has implications for how it might be combined with behavioral therapies.
The eye-tracking mechanism provides a measurable biomarker for oxytocin's social effects.
The numbers in context
40 participants; 24 IU oxytocin; enhanced empathy for positive and negative stimuli; increased face viewing time; decreased body/background viewing
How the study worked
This was a randomized, placebo-controlled, within-subject experiment. Forty healthy male participants received either intranasal oxytocin (24 IU) or placebo on separate sessions. They completed the Multifaceted Empathy Task while eye-tracking recorded where they looked. The study was registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.
Who was studied
Healthy male adults (human)
What this study cannot tell us
This study included only male participants, and oxytocin's effects may differ in women. The sample size of 40, while adequate for a within-subject design, limits generalizability.
The Multifaceted Empathy Task uses pictures, which may not fully capture empathy in real-world social interactions.
How to read the evidence
Moderate evidence from a well-designed randomized crossover trial, though limited to male participants with n=40.
When this study was published
Published in 2020. Oxytocin's social effects continue to be studied, with increasing focus on individual differences in response.
The bigger picture
Understanding how oxytocin enhances empathy is critical for developing it as an autism treatment. If the mechanism is attention redirection to faces, then therapies combining oxytocin with social skills training could be particularly effective.
Questions still open
- Does this attention-shift mechanism also occur in women?
- Would oxytocin help ASD patients by redirecting their gaze to faces?
- Is the empathy enhancement sustained with repeated dosing?
Common questions
How does oxytocin increase empathy?
Could this help people with autism?
Read the original research
Oxytocin Facilitation of Emotional Empathy Is Associated With Increased Eye Gaze Toward the Faces of Individuals in Emotional Contexts.
Frontiers in neuroscience, 14, 803
Citation
Le, Jiao; Kou, Juan; Zhao, Weihua; Fu, Meina; Zhang, Yingying; Becker, Benjamin; Kendrick, Keith M. (2020). Oxytocin Facilitation of Emotional Empathy Is Associated With Increased Eye Gaze Toward the Faces of Individuals in Emotional Contexts.. Frontiers in neuroscience, 14, 803. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2020.00803