Plasma Oxytocin Is Not Associated with Social Cognition or Behavior in Frontotemporal Dementia and Alzheimer's Disease Syndromes.

INTRODUCTION: Changes in social behavior and emotion processing are common in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and semantic dementia (SD), and less so in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Recent research has investigated oxytocin as a potential treatment for these symptoms; however, whether plasma oxytocin is associated with social-emotional symptoms of dementia remains underexplored. METHODS: Thirty behavioral-variant FTD (bvFTD), 28 SD, 39 AD, and 24 controls underwent blood sampling to measure oxytocin. Participants completed an emotion processing battery. Carers completed the Cambridge Behavioral Inventory and the Neuropsychiatric Inventory. RESULTS: Patients with bvFTD were severely impaired in emotion processing and behavioral ratings, with milder impairment in SD and AD. No difference in plasma oxytocin was observed between groups (p = 0.632). No significant associations were found between oxytocin and social behavior or emotion processing (r values between -0.241 and 0.227, all p values >0.099). CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that plasma oxytocin is not reduced in dementia and is unrelated to social, emotional, and behavioral features. We noted high interindividual variability in our data; hence, future investigations should consider methodological influences such as serum versus saliva and diurnal variation on oxytocin function. These results demonstrate that current measurement measures of plasma oxytocin have limited utility in determining the role of oxytocin in FTD. Alternative oxytocin measures may prove more sensitive and should be considered when conducting clinical trials.

Inhibiting automatic negative social responses in alcohol intoxication: interactions with theory of mind ability and level of task guidance.

RATIONALE: Alcohol intoxication is associated with socially disinhibited behaviours that may reflect impaired social cognitive abilities that guide social behaviour. The effects of alcohol on social cognition and how this may contribute to disinhibited behaviour are poorly understood. The aim of this study was to examine whether intoxicated individuals could inhibit automatic negative responses to negative social information, whether these difficulties were reliant on theory of mind (ToM) ability and whether intoxicated individuals were able to adjust verbal responses when provided with guidelines about how to respond. METHODS: Sixty-four participants aged between 18 and 34 (balanced for gender) consumed a beverage containing either placebo or alcohol calculated to achieve a target BrAC of 0.080%, before completing a Flanker task, a go/no-go task and a novel measure of social disinhibition, the social disinhibition task. RESULTS: Results indicate that alcohol-intoxicated individuals can inhibit negative responses to negative social information, but display difficulty inhibiting negative responses to social information that requires ToM. They also suggest that people under the influence of moderate-to-high-dose alcohol can adjust their responses when provided with specific guidelines on how to respond. CONCLUSIONS: These findings may have important implications for understanding negative alcohol-related behaviours and promote the consideration of social context, social pressure and social cognitive abilities in the development of public policy and targeted interventions to prevent alcohol-related antisocial behaviours.

Alcohol intoxication impairs recognition of fear and sadness in others and metacognitive awareness of emotion recognition ability.

Alcohol intoxication is linked to negative social behaviors, but the mechanisms underlying this relationship are poorly understood. We investigated the effects of high-dose alcohol intoxication on the ability to perceive a range of basic emotions (sad, happy, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise) of different intensities, and on self-appraisals of emotion perception ability (i.e., metacognitive judgments). Sixty-four participants consumed either an alcohol or placebo beverage. An emotion recognition task was used to assess emotion perception ability, and participants provided confidence ratings when providing each emotion recognition response. Alcohol-intoxicated individuals demonstrated a reduced ability to detect fear and sadness at moderate-to-high levels of emotion intensity and less overall insight into their ability to recognize emotions. These results provide new insights into the possible difficulties experienced by alcohol-intoxicated individuals in perceiving emotions in others and the limited capacity to monitor their emotion perception abilities, both of which may contribute to inappropriate social responding. (PsycINFO Database Record