No effect of 25 mg oxazepam on physiological and self-rated responses to pain in others: a randomized controlled experiment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<strong>Abstract</strong><br><strong><em>Background:</em></strong> Benzodiazepines have been proposed to inhibit empathic responding to<br>others' pain.<br><em><strong>Aims:</strong> </em>We aimed to investigate the effect of 25 mg oxazepam on self-rated experience,<br>skin conductance, heart rate, and superciliary corrugator muscle activity when<br>observing another person in pain.<br><em><strong>Methods:</strong></em> In a double-blind randomized controlled experiment, participants were given<br>25 mg oxazepam or placebo and then pain stimulated with electrical shocks, alternately<br>with another person whom they thought was a fellow experimental participant.<br><em><strong>Results:</strong> </em>Oxazepam did not cause increased responses to others' pain, compared to<br>participants' own pain, on any of the measures used. Oxazepam did cause increased<br>ratings of unpleasantness and increased skin conductance responses across conditions.<br>Empathic responses were predicted by self-rated empathy using the interpersonal<br>reactivity index and inversely predicted by self-rated alexithymia using the Toronto<br>Alexithymia Scale-20.<br><em><strong>Conclusions:</strong> </em>Oxazepam did not inhibit empathic responding in this experiment.<br>Oxazepam did cause a general increase in self-rated unpleasantness and skin<br>conductance responses
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".