Oxytocin Administration, Neural Sensitivity, and Autism

Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH)

DOI: 10.13056/acamh.24918
In this Papers Podcast, Dr. Matthijs Moerkerke discusses his JCPP paper ‘Can repeated intranasal oxytocin administration affect reduced neural sensitivity towards expressive faces in autism? A randomized controlled trial‘ (https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13850). Mattijis is the first author of the paper.
There is an overview of the paper, methodology, key findings, and implications for practice.
Discussion points include:

• Why oxytocin is of interest in the investigation of autism.
• The differential effect of acute versus repeated oxytocin administration.
• The pros and cons of repeated oxytocin administration dampening neural sensitivity towards expressive faces in children with autism.
• Implications of the findings for mental health professionals and policymakers.

In this series, we speak to authors of papers published in one of ACAMH’s three journals. These are The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (JCPP); The Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) journal; and JCPP Advances.