Oxytocin and Reduction of Social Threat Hypersensitivity in Women With Borderline Personality Disorder
Katja Bertsch,Matthias Gamer,Brigitte Schmidt,Ilinca Schmidinger,Stephan Walther,Thorsten Kästel,Knut Schnell,Christian Büchel,Gregor Domes,Sabine C. Herpertz +9 more
TLDR
Borderline patients exhibit a hypersensitivity to social threat in early, reflexive stages of information processing, and oxytocin may decrease social threat hypersensitivity and thus reduce anger and aggressive behavior in borderline personality disorder or other psychiatric disorders with enhanced threat-driven reactive aggression.Abstract:
Objective: Patients with borderline personality disorder are characterized by emotional hyperarousal with increased stress levels, anger proneness, and hostile, impulsive behaviors. They tend to ascribe anger to ambiguous facial expressions and exhibit enhanced and prolonged reactions in response to threatening social cues, associated with enhanced and prolonged amygdala responses. Because the intranasal administration of the neuropeptide oxytocin has been shown to improve facial recognition and to shift attention away from negative social information, the authors investigated whether borderline patients would benefit from oxytocin administration. Method: In a randomized placebocontrolled double-blind group design, 40 nonmedicated, adult female patients with a current DSM-IV diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (two patients were excluded based on hormonal analyses) and 41 healthy women, matched on age, education, and IQ, took part in an emotion classification task 45 minutes after intranasal administration of 26 IU of oxytocin or placebo. Dependent variables were latencies and number or initial reflexive eye movements measured by eye tracking, manual response latencies, and blood-oxygen-level-dependent responses of theamygdalato angryandfearfulcompared with happy facial expressions. Results: Borderline patients exhibited more and faster initial fixation changes to the eyes of angry faces combined with increased amygdala activation in response to angry faces compared with the control group. These abnormal behavioral and neural patterns were normalized after oxytocin administration. Conclusions: Borderline patients exhibit a hypersensitivity to social threat in early, reflexive stages of information processing. Oxytocin may decrease social threat hypersensitivity and thus reduce anger and aggressive behavior in borderline personality disorder or other psychiatric disorders with enhanced threat-driven reactive aggression. (Am J Psychiatry 2013; 170:1169–1177)read more
Citations
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Psychophysiological effects of oxytocin on parent-child interactions: A literature review on oxytocin and parent-child interactions.
Monika Szymanska,Marie Schneider,Carmela Chateau-Smith,Sylvie Nezelof,Lauriane Vulliez-Coady +4 more
TL;DR: Most of the findings are in accordance with recent ideas that OT administration may increase parent–child prosocial interaction, showing that OT exerts beneficial effects on processes thought to promote bonding, sensitivity, and synchrony, but it is found that OT can induce antisocial behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI
Sex- and context-dependent effects of oxytocin on social sharing.
Xiaole Ma,Weihua Zhao,Ruixue Luo,Feng Zhou,Yayuan Geng,Liqin Xu,Zhao Gao,Xiaoxiao Zheng,Benjamin Becker,Keith M. Kendrick +9 more
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that OXT facilitates the impact of sharing positive experiences with others in women, but not men, and that this is associated with differential effects on the amygdala and insula and their functional connections.
Journal ArticleDOI
On the role of oxytocin in borderline personality disorder
TL;DR: Findings suggest that in BPD OT is associated with enhanced defensive mechanisms and avoidance behaviour, and gene-environment interaction concerning polymorphic variations of the OXTR gene and childhood adversity in B PD suggests that these genes convey developmental flexibility or 'differential susceptibility' to environmental contingencies, whereby BPD resides at the poor outcome end of the spectrum.
Journal ArticleDOI
Emotion Regulation and Social Cognition as Functional Targets of Mechanism-Based Psychotherapy in Major Depression With Comorbid Personality Pathology.
Knut Schnell,Sabine C. Herpertz +1 more
TL;DR: Functional systems are characterizes as targets of integrated modular psychotherapy for episodes of major depression (MD) with a comorbid condition of borderline personality disorder (BPD) or chronic depression (CD) and suggests a layout of modular interventions that can address identified dysfunctions inComorbid MD.
Journal ArticleDOI
Role of the oxytocin system in amygdala subregions in the regulation of social interest in male and female rats.
TL;DR: It is shown for the first time that extracellular OT release in the CeA is similar between males and females and that OTR inThe CeA plays a causal role in the regulation of social interest toward juvenile conspecifics in males.
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