Oxytocin reduces subjective fear in naturalistic social contexts via enhancing top-down middle cingulate-amygdala regulation and brain-wide connectivity

Accumulating evidence from animal and human studies suggests a fear-regulating potential of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT), yet the clinical translation into novel interventions for pathological fear requires a behavioral and neurofunctional characterization under close-to-real life conditions. Here, we combined a naturalistic fMRI-design inducing high and immersive fear experience in social and non-social contexts with a preregistered between-subjects randomized double-blind placebo-controlled intranasal OT trial (24 IU, n = 67 healthy men). OT reduced subjective fear in non-social and social contexts with small or moderate effect sizes, respectively. In the social fear contexts, OT enhanced left middle cingulate cortex (lMCC) activation and its functional connectivity with the contralateral amygdala, with both neural indices significantly and inversely associated with subjective fear following OT. On the network level, OT enhanced communication between the dorsal attention network (DAN) with the fronto-parietal (FPN) and the default-mode network (DMN) as well as on the more fine-grained level brain-wide communication. These findings indicate a fear-reducing potential of OT under naturalistic conditions with pronounced effects in social contexts, suggesting a high treatment value in disorders with social context-related excessive fear.