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Oxytocin

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Submitted By f2life2003
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In the article Oxytocin improves the accuracy of trustworthiness judgments, but does not make a face appear more trustworthy, Bruno Lambert, Carolyn H. Declerck, and Christophe Boone claim that oxytocin trusting behavior through a general anxiolytic effect and previous research was had inconsistent results. They had realized that the previous studies had never made use of manipulated stimuli and believed that the stimuli could help in isolation of dimensions of trustworthiness. They decided that using artificially morphed faces to manipulate the the dimension of trustworthiness would fill the gap of the previous studies without changing key factors such as emotions or face symmetry. During the research they decided to test two hypotheses 1.) oxytocin has a main level-effect that facilitates the perception of trustworthiness and 2.) oxytocin improves the discriminatory ability of social perception so that people become more accurate in distinguishing faces. In a double blind experiment half the participants were given oxytocin and the remaining half had been given a placebo. Participants were asked to conducte two judgement tasks on a computer. In the first task participants were asked to evaluate the trustworthiness of a series of pictures that had been artificially morphed from neutral faces and then in task two the participants compared a morphed face that had been artificially manipulated to vary along the dimension of trustworthiness, with a neutral face. The participants were asked to rate the faces on a scale of -4 to +4 to rate the trustworthiness of the face they had seen. On the first task oxytocin did not affect the evaluation. In task two significantly less untrustworthy faces were misclassified as trustworthy in the group that had been given the oxytocin. Oxytocin had improved the discriminatory ability of untrustworthy, but not trustworthy faces At the end .of the experiment they concluded that oxytocin does not facilitate trustworthiness, but helped in recognizing an untrustworthy face.

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