Disrupting tumor angiogenesis has been shown effective for tumor growth and metastasis inhibition

nt gain. However, a number of studies have reported that the endowment effect can also be viewed as an exemplar of a mere ownership effect whereby a target object is rated more favorably by an owner than a non-owner and a recent review of the field has also emphasized this Neuromedin N site aspect. One’s sense of self can therefore extend beyond the sense of body ownership and agency, to include one’s possessions and these can therefore be considered as part of one’s extended self. Because of the intrinsic tendency to enhance one’s self, the association between possession and self subsequently boosts the possession’s perceived value. Our tendency to emphasize our positive self-characteristics is also relevant in this respect and there is evidence that OXT can enhance this positivity. This concept of one’s sense of self being extended to include possessions is further supported in the context of the endowment effect by our recent study showing that in members of a collectivist culture where the sense of self is extended to include close others, this also extends to placing greater value on their possessions. Based on previous experiments indicating that OXT reduces self-interest by increasing consideration of others we therefore hypothesized that in Chinese subjects it would either selectively reduce the endowment effect for self- and mother-owned objects or alternatively extend it to include objects owned by others not normally included in the extended self. The mPFC has been implicated in seemingly disparate cognitive functions, such as understanding the minds of other people, processing information about the self, mental states, physical characteristics, self-reflection, person perception and making inferences about others’ thoughts. In an imagined ownership paradigm, the mPFC showed greater activity for self-owned objects compared with otherowned ones. Additionally, mPFC activation is increased for self- vs. other-owned objects and recognition memory for self-owned objects is correlated with this. Increased mPFC activation has also been found in association with the endowment effect. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that the mPFC is involved in PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19816210 the incorporation of self-relevant objects into one’s sense of self. Thus we hypothesized that since OXT decreases the activity of both dorsal and ventral regions of the mPFC during self-processing involving trait-judgments, it would have a similar impact in relation to the self-bias associated with possessions. We have therefore investigated the effects of intranasal OXT effect on self-processing in the context of the endowment effect in two independent studies, the second of which was combined with functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural substrates involved. Performing two independent studies also allowed us establish the general reproducibility of any observed behavioral effects of OXT and additionally whether two different doses of OXT which have previously been shown to produce functional effects might have a different efficacy. In our previous study using Chinese subjects we found evidence using a trait-judgment paradigm both for an extended sense of self incorporating close relatives such as mother, and that OXT effects were moderated by levels of self-esteem. The first study involved a behavioral analysis of the influence of OXT on the endowment effect using a lower functional dose while in a second study OXT effects on the endowment effect were investigated durin