Biological Basis of Individual Variation in Social Cooperation

• Status: Completed
• Trial end date: 2016-11-01
• Target enrollment: 0
• Participant gender: All

Summary

The project has three overall objectives. The first is to determine whether and how administration of intranasal oxytocin (OT) and intranasal vasopressin (AVP) influence cooperative decision-making and neural responses to cooperative and un-cooperative social interactions. The second is to determine whether and how intranasal vasopressin influences subjective evaluations of and neural responses to same and opposite-sex face stimuli and to determine if any of these effects persist beyond the period of AVP exposure. The third objective is to determine if intranasal OT influences empathy-related behavior and associated brain activity.

• Phase: N/A
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers?: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Details

• Lead Sponsor: Emory University; James K. Rilling, PhD
• Collaborators: John Templeton Foundation; National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
• Treatments: Arginine Vasopressin; Lorazepam; Oxytocin; Vasopressins

Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• 18-30 years of age

• 21-30 for Faces component

• Normal or corrected-to-normal vision of 20/40

• Unmedicated depressed or anxious men between 18-22 years of age for Anxious and Depressed component

Exclusion Criteria:

• Pregnancy, recent birth, or breastfeeding

• History of seizures

• Neurological Disorder

• Current psychiatric disorder

• Previous psychiatric disorder (can be included as discretion of PI)

• Current use of psychoactive drugs

• Previous use of psychoactive drugs (can be included as discretion of PI)

• Previous head trauma (can be included at discretion of PI)

• Alcoholism or substance abuse

• Hypertension

• Cardiovascular Disease

• Nephritis

• Diabetes

• Endocrine disease or malignancy

• Asthma (can be included as discretion of PI, if episodes are infrequent, nonmedicated, and no active problems at time of study)

• Migraines (can be included as discretion of PI, if episodes are infrequent, nonmedicated, and no active problems at time of study)

• Claustrophobia (at discretion of PI)

Additional exclusion criteria for Lorazepam arm

• Acute narrow-angle glaucoma

• Compromised respiratory function (e.g. sleep apnea and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)

• Impaired renal and hepatic function