DISCUSSION
caregiving behavior, pain
In this study, we investigated the effects of OXT in a group of healthy nulliparous women on neural responses toward children in positive social situations, or in distressing situations, in a newly developed neuroimaging task. The task evoked emotion‐specific effects on behavior and neural responses. The ratings on how much compassion participants felt with the children validated our task on a subjective level: negative images received significantly higher ratings of compassion than neutral or positive ones. Testing for the effect of OXT administration on subjective feelings of compassion toward the children in the images showed no significant results after correction for multiple comparisons.On the neural level, images depicting children in positive social situations activated areas related to reward and salience processing (Bos et al., Regarding the effect of drug administration, we did not observe overall effects of OXT in any a priori ROIs or areas that showed task‐related effects, although an interaction effect of OXT and emotional valence was found in the left sPFC. OXT induced a small but significant decrease of activation to positive stimuli in the sPFC. This finding should be interpreted with caution given that the region did not show task‐related effects and did not belong to our a priori ROIs. Previous research found the left sPFC to be mainly involved in working memory load (Boisgueheneuc et al., Importantly, we hypothesized that OXT modulation would vary (Bos et al., While we cannot conclude that OXT impacts prefrontal regulation of amygdala and hippocampus, our results do show, for the first time to our knowledge, that OXT modulates activity in limbic and prefrontal structures to cues of children depending on childhood emotional neglect in women. Our findings are difficult to compare with other studies that look at the interaction of OXT administration and early life adversities. These studies measure stress reactivity or resting state (Fan et al., In line with the increase of amygdala reactivity after OXT found in our sample, a study investigating neural reactivity to emotional stimuli in individuals shortly posttrauma found increased amygdala reactivity to negative emotional stimuli after OXT compared to placebo (Frijling et al., Overall, the results suggest that in individuals who experienced emotional neglect, OXT boosts emotion and salience perception of socially rewarding and neutral images of children by increasing activity in amygdala and hippocampus and simultaneously decreasing activity in the vmPFC and sPFC. Being responsive to reward signals from children is highly relevant for communication and bonding, and therefore a crucial aspect of caregiving behavior (Bos, We were surprised not to find effects on the Nacc, caudate, and VTA, since in our previous work on the same sample of women we did show activation in the bilateral VTA as well as putamen, amygdala, insula, and ACC in response to infant faces (Bos et al., We found no effects in areas involved in response to watching physical pain stimuli with a high aversive component (Bos et al., In conclusion, the study validated our newly developed neuroimaging task on neural responses to infant cues of different emotional valence. Effects of OXT administration were mostly dependent on the level of self‐reported childhood emotional neglect for our hypothesized regions amygdala, hippocampus, and vmPFC. This study is the first, to our knowledge, to report that exposure to emotional neglect during childhood in a subclinical range in women results in increased neural reactivity of amygdala and hippocampus, and a deactivation of prefrontal areas after OXT. The results suggest that OXT facilitates the processing of rewarding and neutral pictures from infants, which is relevant for how women process affective signals from children, and thus for caregiving behavior. The findings further contribute to literature suggesting a crucial role for OXT in increasing salience perception of social cues, highlighting the importance of individual characteristics.