Early life adversity shapes neural and behavioural responses to oxytocin during altruistic decision-making
Nina Marsh, Vanessa Jeske, Mari Babasiz, Angela Herscheid, Ann-Kathrin Kreuder, Rüdiger Stirnberg, Tony Stoecker, Abigail A. Marsh, Johannes Schultz, René Hurlemann · 2026
Read Early life adversity shapes neural and behavioural responses to oxytocin during altruistic decision-making by Nina Marsh, Vanessa Jeske, Mari Babasiz, Angela Herscheid, Ann-Kathrin Kreuder, Rüdiger Stirnberg, Tony Stoecker, Abigail A. Marsh, Johannes Schultz, René Hurlemann (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13408452.txt.
Description
Nina Marsh and co-authors ask in 2026 whether a hard childhood changes how the hormone oxytocin steers giving in adults. Oxytocin is known to shape social behaviour. Early hardship can also blunt the will to help strangers. Volunteers played a donation task inside a brain scanner. Each had first received oxytocin or a placebo.
The hormone pushed the two groups in opposed directions. Adults reporting more childhood hardship donated more under oxytocin. Those with gentler childhoods donated less. Brain recordings matched the behaviour. Links between two brain areas tied to social judgement and empathy shifted in step. The team reads this as early life tuning the social circuits of the brain. The same chemical signal then lands in unlike ways, depending on a person's past.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Nina Marsh, Vanessa Jeske, Mari Babasiz, Angela Herscheid, Ann-Kathrin Kreuder, Rüdiger Stirnberg, Tony Stoecker, Abigail A. Marsh, Johannes Schultz, René Hurlemann |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 44 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |