Oxytocin and Human Social Behavior

Despite a general consensus that oxytocin (OT) has prosocial effects, there is no clear agreement on how these effects are achieved. Human research on OT is reviewed under three broad research initiatives: attachment and trust, social memory, and fear reduction. As an organizing perspective for scholars’ current knowledge, a tentative model of the causes and effects of alterations in OT level is proposed. The model must remain provisional until conceptual and methodological problems are addressed that arise from a failure to distinguish between traits and states, differing research paradigms used in relation to OT as an independent versus dependent variable, and the possibility that OT effects depend on the initial emotional state of the individual. Social and personality psychologists have important roles to play in developing more rigorous and creative research designs.

• Publication year

  2010

• Venue

  Personality and Social Psychology Review

• Publication date

  2010-04-30

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/1088868310363594PMID 20435805
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Transactions

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