The ability to "read the mind" of other individuals, that is, to infer their mental state by interpreting subtle social cues, is indispensable in human social interaction. The neuropeptide oxytocin plays a central role in social approach behavior in nonhuman mammals. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject design, 30 healthy male volunteers were tested for their ability to infer the affective mental state of others using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) after intranasal administration of 24 IU oxytocin. Oxytocin improved performance on the RMET compared with placebo. This effect was pronounced for difficult compared with easy items. Data suggest that oxytocin improves the ability to infer the mental state of others from social cues of the eye region. Oxytocin might play a role in the pathogenesis of autism spectrum disorder, which is characterized by severe social impairment. Clearly, this suggests that oxytocin not only modulates mesolimbic brain structures. Earlir studies have implicated the fusiform face area and superior temporal sulcus in extracting social information from facial perception. May oxytocin also impact on these structures? Whatever turns out to be the case, I imagine that no politician or CEO will ever sit down at the negotiation table again without their trusty bottle of oxytocin.

    The trust hormone, it seems, is also the mind-reading hormone. A sniff of oxytocin, which underpins social attachment among animals, also turns out to improve men's ability to read other people's emotions.

    Two years ago, researchers reported that oxytocin increases trust. Now a team led by Gregor Domes at Rostock University, Germany has investigated one of the basic components of trust: emotional recognition.

    The researchers sprayed oxytocin up the noses of 30 men and tested how well they could read the emotions conveyed by photographs of eyes taken in real-life situations. Twenty of them performed significantly better on the test after sniffing the hormone (Biological Psychiatry, vol 61, p 731). Domes suggests that oxytocin could be investigated as a treatment for people with autism, who struggle to read.