Association of Genetic Variation in the Promoter Region of OXTR with Differences in Social Affective Neural Processing英文文献资料.docVIP

Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science, 2012, 2, 60-66 /10.4236/jbbs.2012.21007 Published Online February 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jbbs) Association of Genetic Variation in the Promoter Region of OXTR with Differences in Social Affective Neural Processing Garret O’Connell 1 , Heather C. Whalley 1 , Prerona Mukherjee 1 , Andrew C. Stanfield 1 , Christian Montag 2 , Jeremy Hall , Martin Reuter 1 2,3 1 Division of Psychiatry, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK Department of Psychology, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Center for Economics and Neuroscience, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Email: G.OConnell@pgr.reading.ac.uk 2 3 Received September 8, 2011; revised October 13, 2011; accepted November 11, 2011 ABSTRACT Evidence supports the involvement of oxytocin in social behavior. The oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) has been associ- ated with differences in social brain function and risk for autism. Motivated by recent work, we investigated the effect of variation in the common functional rs2268498 T/C polymorphism in the promoter region of OXTR on neural re- sponses to fear expressions. 46 healthy subjects were divided into genotype groups of C carriers (n = 32) and TT ho- mozygous (n = 14) and neural activity was measured during the recognition of fear and neutral expressions. Results showed that during the recognition of fear expressions, the TT genotype group exhibited increased responding in the inferior occipital gyrus, considered important for face processing, compared to carriers of the C allele (P 0.005; clus- ter corrected for whole brain), an effect not found for neutral faces. These results indicate the impact of this OXTR ge- netic variant on individual differences in social affective neural processing. Keywords: OXTR; Promoter Region; Inferior Occipital Gyrus; fMRI; Emotional Facial Processing 1. Introduction oxytocin have been intensively studied is