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Although there has been much interest in understanding the effect of gratitude on health-related outcomes, this remains an understudied area of research, particularly regarding mechanisms and measurement of biological outcomes. The present study explored whether a gratitude intervention could reduce inflammatory outcomes and whether this occurred through increased support-giving. Healthy women (n = 76) were randomly assigned to a 6-week gratitude intervention (i.e., writing on topics intended to induce gratitude) or a control condition (i.e., neutral writing). Support-giving and markers of inflammation were measured pre- and postintervention. Those in the gratitude intervention (vs. control) reported higher postintervention levels of support-giving. Moreover, those with lower levels of psychological distress gave more support as a function of the gratitude intervention. Regarding inflammatory outcomes, although there was no effect of the gratitude intervention on postintervention inflammatory markers, increases in support-giving across the entire sample were related to decreases in inflammatory markers. These results, along with a scarcity of work in this area, suggest that further work is needed to more fully understand the relationships between gratitude and biological markers relevant to health. Finally, these novel findings linking support-giving and decreases in inflammation also indicate that the mammalian caregiving system, associated with enhanced support-giving and reduced physiological stress responding, is a mechanism worth further examination to elucidate the links between social support and health. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Research examining oxytocin and vasopressin in humans has the potential to elucidate neurobiological mechanisms underlying human sociality that have been previously unknown or not well characterized. A primary goal of this work is to increase our knowledge about neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders characterized by impairments in social cognition. However, years of research highlighting wide-ranging effects of, in particular, intranasal oxytocin administration have been tempered as the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and other disciplines have been addressing concerns over the reproducibility and validity of research findings. We present a series of behavioral tasks that were conducted using a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled, between-subjects design, in which our research group found no main effects of oxytocin and vasopressin on a host of social outcomes. In addition to null hypothesis significance testing, we implemented equivalence testing and Bayesian hypothesis testing to examine the sensitivity of our findings. These analyses indicated that 47-83% of our results (depending on the method of post-hoc analysis) had enough sensitivity to detect the absence of a main effect. Our results add to evidence that intranasal oxytocin may have a more limited direct effect on human social processes than initially assumed and suggest that the direct effects of intranasal vasopressin may be similarly limited. Randomized controlled trial registration: NCT01680718.

Two competing views implicate interdependence in empathy. One suggests that interdependence may generally enhance empathy (Woltin et al., British Journal of Social Psychology 50:553–562, 2011), whereas another suggests that interdependence enhances empathy for targets with whom one is in a relationship, at the cost of decreasing empathy for strangers (Markus and Kitayama, Perspectives on Psychological Science 5(4):420–430, 2010). Here, we show evidence in support of the latter account. We observed that trait-level interdependence positively correlated with trait-level empathic abilities in perspective-taking and empathic concern. However, using an empathy for social exclusion paradigm, we found that neural responses to a friend’s compared to a stranger’s social exclusion (vs. inclusion) differentially related to interdependence, perspective-taking and empathic concern. During the observation of a friend’s social exclusion (vs. inclusion), neural responses in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and to a lesser extent the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula (AI), positively correlated with self-reported trait interdependence, perspective-taking, and empathic concern. In contrast, during the observation of a stranger’s social exclusion (vs. inclusion), neural responses in the MPFC, and to a lesser extent the dACC and AI, negatively correlated with self-reported trait interdependence, perspective-taking and empathic concern. These findings suggest that while trait interdependence may correspond with enhanced ability to empathize, as indicated by self-report measures, interdependent individuals may preferentially recruit this ability for close others relative to strangers.