Authors
Anthony Lane, Moïra Mikolajczak, Olivier Luminet
Publication date
2015
Conference
International Conference of Psychological Science
Description
The neurohormone Oxytocin (OT) has been of the most studied peptides in behavioral sciences over the past two decades. Research on OT has notably shown that OT increases trust, facilitates mind reading, make people more sensitive to other’s felling, promotes altruistic behaviors, is linked with parent-infant attachment, enhances non-kin perceived trustworthiness and attractiveness and increases emotional recognition. These findings contributed to build OT’s reputation as the social hormone par excellence. Trying to understand the mechanism underlying OT’s effects, several studies have put forward a theory suggesting that OT increases the salience of social clues. As OT magnifies those clues, people on OT (versus a control group) or with a higher basal level of this hormone are more responding to those. From this consideration we formulated to following hypothesis: as OT enhances the salience of social clues, our attention should be more focused toward theses social clues to allow us to respond or interact adequately. This poster present a “real-life” experimental study that aim to check our hypothesis. Sixty-one male adults were randomly assigned either in OT or Placebo (PL) condition. We set up an ecological paradigm where participants were secretly filmed by two hidden webcams. They were asked to fill a distracting questionnaire and during this the experimenter suddenly start to show himself in distress after receiving a fake bad new by e-mail. During five minutes the experimenter displays several verbal and non verbal negative emotions like sadness, anger, desperation, frustration,… The webcams allow us to film participants …
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