“Individual differences in ‘mentalizing’ in humans are mediated by variations in oxytocin-related neuronal signalling”. How convincing is this view?

Frith and Frith (2006) defined “the term mentalizing was coined to refer to the process by which we make inferences about mental states.” Those mental states involve self-perception and perception of the others. Such mental states are characterized by emotions (e.g. I think Joan is angry). Mentalizing overlaps with the idea of empathy which refers to “sharing the other’s emotions or beliefs”. It is believed that mental states influence human behaviours (e.g. Joan is going to shout at me because she is angry) and such assumption is known as the “Theory of Mind”. Understanding of the other’s emotional states is important in social interaction. A neuropeptide oxytocin is found to promote various social behaviours. Moreover, studies suggest that oxytocin may enhance mentalizing. In this essay I shall explain why oxytocin may lead to such internal ability, provide evidences for the oxytocin idea and discuss the validity of the related experimental evidences and the effect of oxytocin in mentalizing and provide others views about oxytocin and mentalizing.

One way to infer the others’ emotional states is through the assessment of social cues. For example, facial expression, tune of voice and body language and so on (Adolphs, 2002). One of these cues is the “reading from the eyes”. The eyes act as a source of information, allow one to estimates the other’s attention, mood and desire etc (Langton, Watt & Bruce (2000). The reading the mind in the eyes test (RMET)(Baron-Cohen, Jolliffe, Mortimore, & Robertson, 1997) was devised to examine the social inference ability of people. In this task, individuals were presented a number of photographs which focused on the eyes-region, and then they were asked to choose a most appropriate emotional ...

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...ion. Firstly, the limitations of the research techniques lead to suspicion about the experimental validiy. Secondly, doubtful questions such as gender difference in mentalizing and neural-siganlling assumption are challenged by the idea that interaction happens between various components of the brain and body. Finally, empathy suggests “sharing of emotion” to understanding the mental states of the others. Alternative social approach also provides another sensitive model to explain the effect of oxytocin in social ability. All in all, the effect of oxytocin in mentalizing still remains doubtful. The sentence “neural-singalling oxytocin affects mentalizing of the individual” is not so convincing. In the future studies, it is suggested to make clear about the underlying mechanisms of oxytocin so that we can understand its effect on mentalizing in a more thorough way.