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Open Imaging Index
MRI Brain

OXT_AVP_PLC_fmridata

Oxytocin, vasopressin and placebo effects on social pain empathy (naturalistic fMRI)

Task fMRI of healthy young adults given intranasal oxytocin, vasopressin or placebo while rating empathy for social pain in video clips, collected to compare how the two hormones change empathy and its brain basis. Raw images are not shared; per-subject contrast maps are public.

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Overview

This figshare record shares derived brain maps from a double-blind, placebo-controlled pharmacological fMRI study at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in Chengdu. Healthy young adults sprayed a single dose of oxytocin (24 IU), arginine vasopressin (20 IU) or placebo into the nose and, about 45 minutes later, were scanned while they watched short clips of people being socially rejected or left alone and rated how much pain they felt for them. The study asked whether the two hormones raise this social pain empathy and whether they act through the same brain systems and gene expression patterns. Both raised the empathy ratings compared with placebo, with partly shared and partly distinct neural patterns. Analysis code is on GitHub.

Composition

The record matches the first sample of the PNAS paper, collected in 2023. Of 103 recruited volunteers, 9 were excluded, leaving 94: 31 in the oxytocin group, 31 in the vasopressin group and 32 on placebo, 46 of them women, with group mean ages between 19.9 and 20.7 years. All were right-handed Han Chinese. The single MATLAB file holds a CANlab fmri_data object with 816 first-level contrast images from these 94 subjects, sampled to 2 mm space and masked to grey matter. The images come from two first-level models with up to five contrasts each. A second sample of 60 people, collected in 2025 and used for replication, is not in this record.

Acquisition

Each session began with 7.5 minutes of eyes-open resting-state fMRI, followed by six task runs of 20 video trials each, 120 clips in total from social pain, social warmth and neutral categories. Scanner and sequence parameters are given only in the paper's supplementary material, which could not be checked.

Known limitations

Only processed contrast maps are public. The raw structural, task and resting-state images are not shared, so the data cannot be reprocessed. The sample is small, narrow in age and ethnicity, and limited to students of one university. The file does not say which contrast number stands for which condition, so the paper's code is needed to interpret the maps.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 94 subjects.

Sex

  • Female 46 100%

Covers 46 of 94 subjects.

Materials and Methods, Participant Recruitment and Group Assignment in Zhang et al. 2025, Oxytocin and vasopressin enhance social pain empathy via common and distinct of neural expressions, genetic pathways, and networks, PNAS

Condition

Groups can overlap

  • Healthy control 94 100%

Materials and Methods, Participant Recruitment and Group Assignment in Zhang et al. 2025, Oxytocin and vasopressin enhance social pain empathy via common and distinct of neural expressions, genetic pathways, and networks, PNAS

Contrast / sequence

Groups can overlap

  • BOLD fMRI 94 100%

OTAVPPLC_end_dataset image_names in OTAVPPLC_end_dataset.mat (CC BY 4.0), image file names in the fmri_data object counted per subject and contrast

Country

  • China 94 100%

Materials and Methods, Participant Recruitment and Group Assignment in Zhang et al. 2025, Oxytocin and vasopressin enhance social pain empathy via common and distinct of neural expressions, genetic pathways, and networks, PNAS

License and access

Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer

Access
Not shared

The data are not available outside the institution or study that holds them

The figshare record holds only derived data: one MATLAB file with a CANlab fmri_data object of 816 grey-matter masked first-level contrast images from 94 participants, openly downloadable under CC BY 4.0. The paper's data availability statement points only to this record, and no route to the raw structural, task or resting-state images is given.

Access page

No published license or data use terms

The data holder has published no license and no data use terms. Any use, sharing or commercial right has to be agreed with the data holder, and nothing can be assumed to be allowed. Default copyright and data protection law still apply.

No license or data use terms are stated for the raw images. The CC BY 4.0 license of the figshare record covers only the derived contrast maps.

Original license text Checked 2026-10-08

What you can do

  • Commercial use Not stated
  • Not stated
  • Train ML models Not stated
  • Create derived data Not stated
  • Publish results Not stated

What you can share

  • Share the data Not stated
  • Share derived data Not stated
  • Share trained models Not stated

What you must do

  • Cite or credit Not stated
  • Share alike Not stated
  • Sign an agreement Not stated
  • Ethics approval Not stated
  • Manuscript review Not stated
  • Release code Not stated
  • Return results Not stated
  • Delete after use Not stated

Limits

  • No re-identification Not stated
  • Location limits Not stated

Citation

Zhang X, Liu Q, Liu C, Wang Z, Fu K, Lan C, Xu T, Zhou X, Kendrick KM, Yao D, Becker B, Zhao W. Oxytocin and vasopressin enhance social pain empathy via common and distinct of neural expressions, genetic pathways, and networks. PNAS 122(39) (2025). doi:10.1073/pnas.2520651122

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.