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Building on our work with voles and other work in other animals, people have
now started experimenting in humans to see what happens if you alter
oxytocin in the human brain,
and we're actually able to do that using the intra-nasal spray so you can
sniff it and apparently some of the oxytocin gets into the brain,
and now there's been numerous studies showing how it affects
personality traits.
Just for example, there was a paper published in nature showing that if you
sniff oxytocin
you become more trusting; you trust other people more.
There are other studies to show that it helps you to read the emotions
of other people,
so just by looking at their faces you can sort of infer what their emotion is.
So I believe that there's quite a bit of evidence that it does sort of
enhance certain social interaction
processes as well as social cognitive abilities, the way we think about our
social world, and there's even been a study showing that
oxytocin may actually enhance social cognitive function in
individuals with Autism or Asperger's syndrome,
so this work may actually lead to some new treatment strategies that could be
effective in treating the social domain in Autism.