Developing pharmacological agents effective in the treatment of cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia is a priority that cannot be overemphasized. Oxytocin, a medication and hormone, is naturally produced in hypothalamus and stored in posterior pituitary gland. As a medication it is used to induce labor, control uterine contractions during labor and stop post-partum hemorrhage. It is involved in bonding with the baby when it is released following stimulation of nipples during breast feeding. It has been shown to regulate learning and memory as well (7). Several small randomized controlled trials have demonstrated promising results with oxytocin on schizophrenia symptomatology, specifically social cognition. The reader is referred to a comprehensive review by MacDonald and Fiefel of preclinical and clinical literature related to the role of oxytocin in schizophrenia (8). This review explores and evaluates the literature published on this topic with the main focus on new findings. The aim of this review is to provide a more current and up-to-date status of oxytocin as a neurohormone relevant to the phenomenology of social cognition and aversive social behaviors in schizophrenia. This review also provides an update of clinical trials of the benefits of oxytocin in …show more content…
At a NIMH workshop, social cognition in schizophrenia was defined as “the mental operations that underlie social interactions, including perceiving, interpreting, and generating responses to the intentions, dispositions, and behaviors of others.” (9) The Social Cognition Psychometric Evaluation (SCOPE) study was designed to identify core social cognitive domains and improve the best existing social cognition measures so that they could be applied to large scale treatment studies (10). Expert surveys in social cognition were invited in 2012 and they identified the following 4 core social cognitive domains