Oxytocin plays an important role in human responses to threat processing. Few studies have directly examined the effects of oxytocin on our response to death-related stimuli. In the current study, 63 participants intranasally received either 32 IU of oxytocin or a placebo and thereafter completed a visual dot-probe task consisting of death-related and non-death related images. The results indicated that oxytocin enhanced participants? vigilance toward death-related images as well as increased their anxiety about and fear of death. Overall, oxytocin am-plifies the defensive responses to a mortality threat, supporting the social salience model of oxytocin.