Attachment, oxytocin, and maternal recollections: Further evidence for the salience hypothesis

Childhood memories featuring primary caregivers are the basis of attachment working models. Oxytocin plays a critical role in attachment bonding and social memory possibly by enhancing the emotional salience of social cues. Consistent with the salience hypothesis, prior work (in males) indicates that oxytocin administration positively biases recollections of maternal care and closeness for less anxious/more secure individuals but negatively biases such recollections for more anxiously attached individuals. We aimed to conceptually replicate and extend this work by probing oxytocin's effects on the emotional quality of attachment memories, and sampling males and females. Between 2013 and 2016, we recruited 77 participants and administered 24 international unit intranasal oxytocin/placebo (within-subject). Participants were presented with attachment-related cue words and, in response, recalled childhood memories of their mothers. We analyzed the emotionality of these memories using human raters and, in exploratory analyses, natural language processing software (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count and Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner). Replicating previous findings, human rater results revealed significant attachment anxiety by oxytocin interactions for negative emotionality (p = .031) and positive emotionality (p = .034), with more anxious participants reporting more negative and less positive emotional content following oxytocin (vs. placebo). The natural language processing analyses also showed significant attachment anxiety by oxytocin interactions for negative but not positive emotionality. Finally, we found no effect of attachment avoidance on emotionality, however, more avoidant individuals were less likely to emotionally self-disclose (p < .001), an effect that was potentiated by oxytocin (p = .05). This study supports the social-emotional salience hypothesis of oxytocin. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).