Assessing socio-communicative sensitivity with clinical and experimental methods

Socio communicative problems are central to some of the psychiatric disorders. For many reasons it is very important to develop good methods to measure this kind of abilities. By doing so we can firstly improve the diagnostic process and set up correct treatment of psychiatric disorders as soon as possible and secondly we can evaluate in objective and reliable ways new possible treatment options. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide believed to be such a possible treatment option, because there is some evidence showing, that oxytocin plays an important role in social interactions. However, the results are not uniform and the working mechanisms is still unknown. The aim of the dissertation is to compare various methods of assessing socio-communicative skills and deficits in healthy and clinical population and to test the oxytocin intervention on socio-communicative sensitivity in healthy population.