Mind Reading, Autism, and Oxytocin
Autistic individuals often have an impaired ability to interpret social cues as communicated through speech intonation, eye movements, and body language. Researchers have theorized that autistic individuals may have lower levels of a hormone called oxytocin, and that the deficiency may help to explain some of the impaired ability to interpret social cues.
Oxytocin is a hormone secreted by the pituitary gland, which is located at the base of the brain. In women, the hormone stimulates contractions of the uterus during labor and release of milk during breast-feeding. In both men and women, oxytocin is associated with increased feelings of trust, commitment, empathy, and compassion.
In a study from earlier this summer:
Oxytocin Increases Retention of Social Cognition in Autism.
researchers found that autistic adults given oxytocin showed improved ability to interpret emotion in speech comprehension tasks.
And, now, in a more recent study of non-autistic individuals, researchers have found that oxytocin seems to also improve the ability to interpret the mental state of others through social cues in the eye region:
Oxytocin Improves “Mind-Reading” in Humans.
This “mind-reading” ability was measured using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), which evaluates how well one can interpret emotions just by looking at photos of the eyes of different subjects.
You can take the quiz yourself here. Try it out. It’s pretty neat.
(I got 32.)
Oxtyocin therapy, although not necessarily addressing a root cause, may prove helpful as part of treatment for some autistics.
Note: It wouldn’t be too surprising if oxytocin levels were off in autistic individuals. Heavy metals, such as mercury, are suspected in the development of autism spectrum disorders. These metals concentrate in structures in the brain, such as the hypothalamus gland, pituitary gland, amygdala, and hippocampus, that help to regulate nearly every hormone in the body, emotions, learning, and memory.
