March 21th, the Xinhua News Agency published an article named Research found: Oxytocin is expected to be a cure of autism. This article reported the results of one of Keith Kendrick’s empirical articles from the journal Neuroendocrinology. The Xinhua News Agency’s article has been reprinted by more than twenty newspapers, websites and social media both by domestic and international media. Here is the original post from the Xinhua News Agency:
    Scientists found that, the so-called “love hormone”, oxytocin, can actually improve the symptoms of autism. Researchers in UESTC found out that oxytocin accelerate the preference of attention towards positive facial expression among individuals with high autism trait. This result was published lately on an international academic journal: Neuroendocrinology.
    Oxytocin is a neuropeptide hormone which is produced and released by hypothalamus; it exists universally in human beings and animals and is essential when giving birth or establish mother-child attachment. Previous researches proved that oxytocin influence our brains in many ways: it’s important in socializing and intimate relationships; it also increases the facial identification ability and decrease the behavior which is antisocial or anxiety oriented.
    World famous neural scientist, Professor Kendrick, in 1980s, discovered oxytocin’s effect on the pro-social behaviors of sheep, such as nursing newborns and building mother-child attachment. This study had drawn the starting point of the oxytocin pro-social research in the scientific world. Nowadays, Professor Kendrick shifted his interest to the probabilities of oxytocin becoming the treatment of psychological disorders.
    In his experiment, Professor Kendrick randomly assigned 60 university students into two groups, one group was given intranasal administration of oxytocin, and the other group was given placebo (normal saline). When the oxytocin was fully absorbed, 45 minutes after administration, two groups of students were asked to complete a task that tests their preferences of faces. The facial expressions of the stimuli were categorized as: neutral (flat), positive (happy) and negative (angry, sad and fear). Results showed that subjects administrated oxytocin tended to prefer neutral and positive facial expressions, and that was particularly obvious among students high on autism trait.
     “This study indicates that oxytocin significantly improved the high- autism trait subjects’ preference while observing positive faces.” Professor Kendrick stated, “Which carries potentially medical value towards treatment of autism spectrum disorder, and hopefully could be introduced to clinical experiments and applications”.