Trial reportTranslational psychiatry2021
Serotonin depletion amplifies distinct human social emotions as a function of individual differences in personality.
Trial report in Translational psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Preparing for future pandemics: enhancing serotonin activation and interpersonal warmth through music therapy to aid in adolescent depression recovery post-COVID-19: a randomized controlled trial.BMC complementary medicine and therapies · 2026Trial
- Acute lorazepam administration does not significantly affect moral attitudes or judgments.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Oxytocin, but not vasopressin, decreases willingness to harm others by promoting moral emotions of guilt and shame.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Trial
- Effects of music therapy as an alternative treatment on depression in children and adolescents with ADHD by activating serotonin and improving stress coping ability.BMC complementary medicine and therapies · 2023Trial
- Tryptophan-enriched diet or 5-hydroxytryptophan supplementation given in a randomized controlled trial impacts social cognition on a neural and behavioral level.Scientific reports · 2021Trial
- High-Amylose Starch and Human Health: Microbiota Modulation, Metabolic Reprogramming, and Disease Prevention.Nutrients · 2026Review
- Dopamine and serotonin transients predict depressive symptom relief following deep brain stimulation of human subcallosal cingulate cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Violence Risk Assessment in Individuals With Substance Use Disorders.Actas espanolas de psiquiatria · 2025Article
- Cell-to-cell communication: from physical calling to remote emotional touching.Discover nano · 2025Article
- Distribution of Serotonergic Transporter Innervation in the Nucleus Accumbens and Ventral Pallidum Is Highly Conserved Among Primates.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Non-Synonymous Substitutions in Cadherin 13, Solute Carrier Family 6 Member 4, and Monoamine Oxidase A Genes are Associated with Personality Traits in Thoroughbred Horses.Behavior genetics · 2024Article
- Individual differences in the boldness of female zebrafish are associated with alterations in serotonin function.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Individual differences in the boldness of female zebrafish are associated with alterations in serotonin function.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Trace amine-associated receptor 1 agonist reduces aggression in brain serotonin-deficient tryptophan hydroxylase 2 knockout rats.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Serotonin and emotion regulation: the impact of tryptophan depletion on emotional experience, neural and autonomic activity.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Psychopathic personality traits stress immunity and social potency moderate the relationship between emotional competence and cognitive functions in depression.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Neural circuit control of innate behaviors.Science China. Life sciences · 2022Review
- Theory of Mind and Preference Learning at the Interface of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and AI: A Review.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2022Review
- Baiap3 regulates depressive behaviors in mice via attenuating dense core vesicle trafficking in subsets of prefrontal cortex neurons.Neurobiology of stress · 2022Article
- Alcohol, Aggression, and Violence: From Public Health to Neuroscience.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Serotonin is involved in a wide range of mental capacities essential for navigating the social world, including emotion and impulse control. Much recent work on serotonin and social functioning has focused on decision-making. Here we investigated the influence of serotonin on human emotional reactions to social conflict. We used a novel computerised task that required mentally simulating social situations involving unjust harm and found that depleting the serotonin precursor tryptophan-in a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled design-enhanced emotional responses to the scenarios in a large sample of healthy volunteers (n = 73), and interacted with individual differences in trait personality to produce distinctive human emotions. Whereas guilt was preferentially elevated in highly empathic participants, annoyance was potentiated in those high in trait psychopathy, with medium to large effect sizes. Our findings show how individual differences in personality, when combined with fluctuations of serotonin, may produce diverse emotional phenotypes. This has implications for understanding vulnerability to psychopathology, determining who may be more sensitive to serotonin-modulating treatments, and casts new light on the functions of serotonin in emotional processing.
Indexed as
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What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.