http://www.nitrc.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=5963 <table border="0" width="100%"><tr><td align="left"/><td align="right"><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&amp;cmd=Link&amp;LinkName=pubmed_pubmed&amp;from_uid=26832991">Related Articles</a></td></tr></table> <p><b>The Effect of Oxytocin on Third-Party Altruistic Decisions in Unfair Situations: An fMRI Study.</b></p> <p>Sci Rep. 2016;6:20236</p> <p>Authors: Hu Y, Scheele D, Becker B, Voos G, David B, Hurlemann R, Weber B</p> <p>Abstract<br/> Humans display an intriguing propensity to help the victim of social norm violations or punish the violators which require theory-of-mind (ToM)/mentalizing abilities. The hypothalamic peptide oxytocin (OXT) has been implicated in modulating various pro-social behaviors/perception including trust, cooperation, and empathy. However, it is still elusive whether OXT also influences neural responses during third-party altruistic decisions, especially in ToM-related brain regions such as the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). To address this question, we conducted a pharmacological functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment with healthy male participants in a randomized, double-blind, cross-over design. After the intranasal administration synthetic OXT (OXT(IN)) or placebo (PLC), participants could transfer money from their own endowment to either punish a norm violator or help the victim. In some trials, participants observed the decisions made by a computer. Behaviorally, participants under OXT(IN) showed a trend to accelerate altruistic decisions. At the neural level, we observed a strong three-way interaction between drug treatment (OXT/PLC), agency (self/computer), and decision (help/punish), such that OXT(IN) selectively enhanced activity in the left TPJ during observations of others being helped by the computer. Collectively, our findings indicate that OXT enhances prosocial-relevant perception by increasing ToM-related neural activations. <br/> </p><p>PMID: 26832991 [PubMed - in process]</p> en-us Copyright 2000-2026 NITRC OSI Mon, 04 May 2026 10:08:57 GMT http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss NITRC RSS generator